120%
Increase in click-through rate
20%
Increase in fully read emails
Company
WordPress VIP is a content management system designed for enterprises in the digital marketplace. With content at its core, it helps organizations build more meaningful engagement opportunities at every step of the customer journey.
Headquarters
California, USA
Industry
Content Management Systems
Size
3,500+
Integration
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement (Pardot)
Challenges
Like a lot of data-driven organizations, the team at WordPress VIP knew the importance of email marketing for generating leads, but its approach relied on a single email template. This meant that despite the quality and variety of their content, it all had the exact same look and feel any time it appeared in an inbox — and engagement was lacking. That’s when WordPress VIP’s Lead Growth Marketer, Christina Child, turned to Knak to kickstart an evolution in the company’s email marketing efforts.
Revitalizing email creation
WordPress VIP has a reputation for creating rich marketing content for its target audience, but the team was being let down by a limited and uninspiring email template. The way Christina sees it, many marketing platforms exist under the assumption that marketing teams have a person dedicated to coding emails in HTML.
However, in her experience, for a lot of SaaS companies, this isn’t the case. The solution? You have to either outsource email design — which isn’t scalable, has a long lead time, and saps up your budget — or rely on static, inflexible, and outdated templates.
Neither of those options are great.
“Outsourcing adds lead time that we don’t always have, and it’s expensive. Then you have pre-made templates from marketing automation platforms, which are so inflexible and boring that they’re virtually useless.” What they needed was an intuitive email creation platform that could help marketers break free of the template they were using, get creative, and revitalize existing and rich marketing content in beautifully designed emails.
Email is an important, low-cost channel for us. It ranks second among our channels for generating influenced opportunities — only behind Google. Doing it right means growing our pipeline.
Making email beautiful once again
Having used Knak in a previous role, Christina knew that the platform could revitalise how her team got emails to market. Knowing that Knak worked well with Pardot, their marketing automation platform (MAP), she made the decision to onboard the software.
In no time at all, the team had a fresh, and flexible new look for their email campaigns. As a first step, Christina led the charge in spinning up a number of modules and formats that could be dropped into various emails. She then got approval from the design team — ensuring that all emails created with those modules are on brand.
The results have been almost immediate. Since starting to use Knak, click-through rate is up 120%. Higher email engagement is also translating to more interactions with the WordPress VIP website. The company has seen an increase in conversions from those areas of the website where users are being directed via email. In fact, from the first content roundup style email created with Knak, the team got more than 100 conversions (users completing a form on the website). And that's just a single email.
The difference in our email, and even our email strategy, is like night and day. It's really empowered us to iterate on email concepts. Knak has helped us to go from ‘we wish we could do this’ to ‘now we know we can’.
Making Knak a strategic platform
One of the biggest benefits that Christina’s team is seeing from Knak is the ability to pivot or iterate on their strategy quickly.
They can rejig an email in under an hour, and the platform’s ease of use means that there’s no bottleneck because the team is empowered to also use the platform to create their own messages.
Beyond that, Knak has also better equipped Christina and her team to do great email testing. “A tactic that I like to use as a growth marketer is to use email as our testing playground for changes we could make on the website,” she says. For example, they might test out things like headlines or button colours via email first — before implementing those iterations more permanently on the website or in paid ad campaigns.
Moving forward, Christina sees more opportunities to use Knak strategically and we’re excited to keep working with (and learning from!) her and her team as they lead the way in developing great email campaigns.
