B2B Email Marketing: How to integrate transparency into the process for quicker turnarounds, better emails and fewer mistakes

At one point, Mary Abrahamson, Email Marketing Manager, Ferguson Enterprises, Inc., like all of us, was new to the team. The problem, though, was that almost everyone else was new as well.

“Email had been a little bit of a revolving door before, so it was about working with a new team, a new structure, a new setup. We had virtually no documentation to start with,” she said.

Abrahamson was working with a team that was already struggling to retain personnel, and she began to self-train, while trying to figure out the reasoning behind the way the system had been set up previously.

The initial instinct, she said, was to leave all the systems as they were, which “doesn’t lend itself to continually improving things,” she said.

To start with, not having documentation made training difficult for team members who came after her, she said, especially since the team didn’t even yet have a style guide.

“When new associates come on, you want there to be a small window for training, learning [and] absorbing,” she said.

The team needed a clear understanding of their own process instead of just going through the existing process. This meant starting with their own internal strategy that would align with the business’ overall strategy.

“We wanted to work toward always being able to deliver on our turnaround times [and] building relationships with stakeholders internally, while creating a better understanding of what we do,” she said.

Abrahamson said she wanted others within the company to look at email as a revenue and conversion driver that also worked as a channel to inform and engage the customer.

For customers, she said, the goal was for email to be “a great lifecycle journey and … something that our customers rely on for the most up to date products and services from Ferguson as well as industry-leading information.”

However, without a buttoned-up process, Abrahamson said, she knew they wouldn’t have an adequate amount of time to focus on added value for customers.

HOW-TO:

To put together these documents and processes, streamline email marketing at Ferguson, and provide customers with value, Abrahamson started at square one.

“You have to start at square one, which is gathering all of the baseline items you need to have as an email marketing team. Square two is starting to button up the process, and square three is where you already have a process, and you’re just making improvements to it while you’re figuring out ways to expand, grow and refresh your focus,” she said.

Having those processes in place that can provide data and feedback, she said, is vital for growth. By understanding how much work is received in a year and how long it takes to complete, the team can assess different ways they can expand — or even do more with less.

Step #1. Define your team and objectives

Square one, Abrahamson said, is all about resisting the urge to go along with what has been set up for you.

“Just jump all in, be willing to get messy, dirty, change things up — or, if you have no process, just dive right into creating one,” she said.

At that point, it’s time to establish a plan and set objectives that allow you to measure yourself and, of course, that align with both company and team goals, she said, to ensure that you’re not “off doing your own thing.” 

Abrahamson and her team set up yearly objectives and goals, going through and conducting an annual strategic plan outline.

In doing this, “we re-look at our mission to make sure that it truly speaks to what we’re trying to accomplish that year,” she said.

This year, she said, the team did something different.

“Instead of just outlining our tactics, we assigned dates to them to help keep us on track,” she said.

Of course, she added, they are internal deadlines. That’s why “we meet on it quarterly — as it’s not always dependent solely on our team to get those projects done. This also allows us the ability to break bigger initiatives down into chunks.”

Thoughtfully form your team

Previously, Abrahamson said, the team was “a one-man band” at times that then gradually moved to two people, three and then a full team of four.

“Now that we have an established team structure, we’re able to split up our workloads with alignment to our skillsets and make sure that internal stakeholders have a primary point of contact,” she said.  

When defining your team, it’s important that everyone — both inside and outside of the immediate team — is clear on what individual team member’s roles are and what internal stakeholders can come to them for.  

“For example, we have one dedicated person to email acquisition and database segmentation so we can make sure that any program or project that requires database needs aligns with her vision for the database … Therefore, she owns that piece of the puzzle,” she said.

Setting up these definitions (through documentation or otherwise) is important, Abrahamson said, because teams have to promote themselves internally as well.

“Internal stakeholders are not going to use you as a service unless they understand what you are able to provide and how your team works,” she said.

Step #2. Establish a brand style guide

“A big one that has come about in the last year and a half or so is our email style guide,” Abrahamson said.

The email style guide speaks to the primary colors, tone, vision and best practices. It’s an overall brand style guide for the whole company, but it also has specific email-oriented processes.

In the email style guide, for example, “we have set colors for our call-to-action buttons. In addition, we have a maximum character count for inside buttons. We also have a set look and feel, which ensures that we have bulletproof buttons in our emails, every single time,” she said.

Another good example, she said, is appropriate imagery. This means no iPhone photos — all imagery has to meet a certain resolution so the product can be seen clearly.

“We have two pages that outline do’s and don’ts for imagery. [For example], our rules around stock images and brand photography,” she said.

Because they didn’t have the style guide, there were a lot of back and forth edits that took up valuable development time.  

The style guide sets expectations and is a great document to have on hand, Abrahamson said, to establish guidelines if there is turnover on her team or the design team they work with.

“It aligns the design team and the email team together. We also meet quarterly to ensure that our processes align and that the email style guide is serving both groups,” she said.

The email style guide outlines some of the following:

• Photography
• Call-to-action specifications
• Sizing details for all elements
• Header and footer information
• Minimum and maximum font sizes for headlines, sub headlines and body copy
• Available colors palette

The purpose of the style guide is to allow people to “still flex their creative muscles but make sure that when an email goes out on behalf of Ferguson, you can’t tell that it’s coming from any one [specific] team member,” she said.

Create a streamlined system

When Abrahamson first came onto the team, she said, they were redesigning emails from “A to Z for every email whether they were local or national. For these services, we were using a third party, which incurred high costs. The solution? A streamlined templating system which we now call our Email Marketing Menu.”

Local field associates can use the team’s Email Marketing Menu to submit a request. This has been an easy resource for them so that they no longer have to take on a marketing role themselves.

“As a result, we do not spend as much on outsourcing because local is now a well-oiled templatized system. Therefore, we are able to handle that work in-house,” she said.

After you’ve established those baselines, “you’re done getting into the nitty-gritty, [and] now you can start to build a foundation for strategic output,” she said.

What comes next, Abrahamson said, is choosing the right supporting software — including a project management system, which helps to streamline the email process.

“For us, it was important to have a project management system that sets the team up for success, sets every project up for success and helps provide visibility to work — with a low error rate,” she said.

 Step #3. Establish detailed systems for transparency

Keeping internal and customer-facing deadlines is all about understanding what your project intake process looks like.

Understanding what your turnaround time is and relaying that to stakeholders outside of the team is vital, as well as understanding your process for ranking the priority of requests.

Marketers need to ask themselves, Abrahamson said, “Do you take in all projects that come in, regardless of missing content? Do you require certain content for requests? And lastly, do you score them based on how well they align with the business and how much information is provided?”

She and her team have established five project elements they have to know for every project, so those are required fields that stakeholders must fill out.

“We are a service to headquarters and our branches. To make sure we’re able to under-promise and over-deliver, we need to make sure we have clear guidelines around the information we need to kick off a project,” she said.

Part of under-promising and over-delivering is making sure there’s an expectation on scope and timing.

“For all our national projects, we have a minimum 15-business-day turnaround time and documentation that outlines what steps take place in those 15 business days — from creative execution to approvals to QA,” she said.

Those different pieces come together for transparency and visibility in the team’s process, and they show others why that turnaround time is set in place.

It’s at this point that having those key roles and approvals set up becomes important. While every email is seen by a myriad of people, Abrahamson said, they’re all looking for something different.

“While I may be looking for things that comply with the email style guide or things we’ve done in the past, an artist is going to be looking for very different things than myself or even the requester. The requester is really there to make sure the content makes sense, it works well for that audience [and that] our product numbers are correct,” she said.

Having different people understand their place during the approval process helps keep a low error rate, while “sharing, informing and educating those you work with on how to best utilize your services,” she said. “The more you can share internally, the better the program will be as a whole.”

Abrahamson and her team have a 10-business-day turnaround rule for local emails, alongside the 15-day rule for national emails.

This clear breakdown shows whom the email is with at any given time during those 10 (or 15) days, and how it circulates down and evolves into a finished product.

Every email project is seen by a plethora of people, she added, but the team makes sure to keep the process as organized as possible so they have the time to look at it from a high level.

“We have seen an increase in email requests, and I would presume that is because we have been very vocal about what we do, how to work with us and how well it works,” she said.

Internal processes tend to get put on the backburner, and marketers know they need to take care of these, but it’s hard to find the time.

With the combination of this transparent turnaround timeline as well as the style guide and Email Marketing Menu, the team has seen a 15% increase in email requests, alongside 80% faster development times and an outsource spend at 30% of the cost.

“It’s going to take time now to formulate your processes and documentation, but there are going to be very minimal updates to it in the future, so your level of effort in the future is going to be lower,” she said.

Step #4. Be vocal with stakeholders about wins

Abrahamson said her team has learned over time that it pays off to be very vocal with your internal stakeholders by putting out reporting and acknowledging quick wins.       

“That’s why we really shout those big wins from the rooftops,” she said.

This is huge, she continued, because while the team is a service for other teams, ultimately, they are trying to provide conversions, revenue and brand loyalty for the company.

To get that information out there, the team reports on both the national and local level every month through an email that has what’s new at the top — for example, abandoned cart remarketing that the team is soon launching for ferguson.com.

They also create a yearly email report and review that is sent out in December that allows them to look back on the year with highlights from each month.

 “What was the biggest success, big win or new program launch? It helps you to give a good snapshot of big things that happened throughout the year,” she said.  

Abraham noted that something the team is working on right now is implementing the Customer Email Experience Program that targets both internal and external customers.

“So, while we may think that we’re doing an awesome job, we need to get that stamp of validation from our stakeholders who work with us internally — as well as our customers — on how they feel about our emails,” she said.

They are taking a two-pronged approach, first with an internal survey. It asks questions like:

• How likely is it that you would recommend the email marketing services at Ferguson to a friend or colleague?
• How would you rate the quality of our email marketing services?
• How responsive have we been to your questions or concerns about the email program?
• How convenient is the email marketing service to use? What do you like most about email marketing here at Ferguson?
• What do you like least about email marketing here at Ferguson?

Second, the team also launched a customer survey. The survey asks questions like: 

• What is your opinion of the volume of emails you receive from Ferguson?
• Which of the following topics would you like to see in Ferguson's emails?
• What suggestions do you have for improving the emails you receive from Ferguson?

Once the team receives feedback, they’re going to sift through it and pull out “general themes and create a 90-day action plan around areas for improvement.” 

To understand the health of the email program, the team is hoping to do these surveys every year, because “we as email specialists need to renew our focus and take a step back from the day-to-day at times,” she said.

Step #5. Continually train and invest in your team

“You need to retain, invest and develop your team,” Abrahamson said.  

When a new person comes onto the team, she said, they need to be professionally certified in the email service provider they use, which includes four badges that the marketer collects before they’re fully certified.

“We try to make sure that we have the best in the business on the team and that they continue to learn each and every day and never feel stagnant,” she said. 

 The 30-60-90 day onboarding plan

Abrahamson and her team work towards professional certifications across the board, but every time a team member comes on board, they establish a 30-60-90-day plan.

“We had a new member join our team at the end of March. She is currently working through her 30-60-90-day plan. The plan helps new team members to dive right in, feel invested from the get-go, and have clear direction in those first three months and beyond,” she said.

 A big part of that onboarding is to understand what is going on day-to-day and what the team members are working on.

“We try to make sure that we’re all on the same page about what’s going on within the team in everyone’s respective area,” she said.

Final thoughts

“Now that you have all these elements working, you’re ready to put it all together. Any email marketing team can be a rock star team with the right tools,” Abrahamson said.

Creative Samples

1. Email style guide
2. Email marketing menu
3. 10 Business day turnaround

Sources

Ferguson

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