Meet Stroller Strides

by Matt McCutchan, Agency Relations | December 29th, 2010 | No Comments »

What’s in, what’s out and what’s really out when it comes to email campaigns and ponytails.

Here at Emma, we’re always keeping an eye on email marketing trends and figuring out the best ideas for our customers. One of the fun parts of my job is relaying that information to some of our key partners such as Stroller Strides, which is a fitness program for moms. In fact, I got together with the franchisees, trainers and staff over at Stroller Strides during their annual conference earlier this year. We talked about email tips and trends to help their franchisees grow their businesses — and these trends just might help you get the most out of your email marketing too.

In: Social sharing
Out: List sharing
Really Out: Side ponytails

A Stroller Strides campaign with Social Sharing icons.

With the number of accounts added daily to the top social networks, the popularity of integrating with social media with email will only increase in the coming months. The moms at Stroller Strides understand that, so they’re taking advantage of Emma’s Social Sharing tool, a simple way to include Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn icons on your emails so that your recipients can share your mailing with their network of friends and followers.

Along with the ease of encouraging your audience to share, Emma gives you priceless insight into which audience members are sharing on what networks, and the number of individuals reading the shared mailing. With over 500 millions accounts on Facebook, 190 million on Twitter and 70 million on LinkedIn, Social Sharing is the perfect chance to expand the reach of your mailing and learn about the social spaces where you need to spend more time interacting with friends and followers.

In: Triggered Email series
Out: Sending to send
Really Out: Your NKOTB collection. Yes, even the comeback album.

A Stroller Strides trigger email with a fitness challenge.

Triggered email series give you an ideal way to keep your audience engaged with your unique area of expertise … even if that is boy-band trivia like Donnie’s favorite holiday or Joey’s nickname (Joe Bird).

At Emma, some of the best response data we’ve seen is from triggered series that include beneficial and relevant information to the recipient. We’ve made a couple of additions to the trigger tool in Emma. One update allows you to automatically send to anyone that has completed one of your surveys, and the other gives you the ability to filter any of the trigger events by group.

At Stroller Strides, using triggers means an opportunity to pass along welcome messages, event reminders, valuable meal plan information and fitness ideas. For you, it might mean some of those things too – as well as a world of opportunity to pass along daily, weekly or monthly messages that show off your unique voice and expertise.

In: Creating smart searches
Out: “E-blasting”
Really Out: Matching acid washed jeans and jean jackets

Creating smart searches can give you better results.

At this year’s conference, we spent some time giving shout-outs to franchisees that received exceptional response data and reached significant milestones. As we looked for commonalities among these accounts, we found that folks using smart searches and highly organized grouping of member data really stood out. Searching through your audience groups for shared audience member traits allows you to compile a highly engaged group – then you can send them specific and relevant messages. This is ideal when you have a message with an especially interactive or important call to action.

Your mailings will be more effective when you send to those most eager to hear a particular type of message. The most useful part about creating a search in Emma? You can create it based on any data you’ve chosen to collect about your audience members. If you’d like to create a new type of search that requires collecting more data, encourage your audience to update their preferences, perhaps with an enticing mailing, special offer or simply further information about the new email messages they’ll start getting if they give you additional data.

These three techniques have helped our friends at Stroller Strides increase their response rates and reach more folks, so we hope you’ll see similar results. We’d love to hear your success stories … or your own lists of what’s in and what’s out. (But seriously, stay away from those matching acid-washed outfits.)