Convince and Convert

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“It’s been really nice working with people who genuinely want to see us succeed”

Kelly Santina

HEAD OF OPERATIONS AND MEDIA

Industry: agency

About Convince and Convert

Convince & Convert is a group of strategic advisors who work with organizations to make digital marketing and customer experiences remarkable.

Emma powers Convince & Convert.

Ever heard of Jay Baer?

He’s kind of a big deal in the marketing world – think the most re-tweeted person in the world by digital marketers (seriously, you can look it up). People pay attention to what he has to say because he truly knows his stuff: He’s written several best-selling books, is a highly sought-after speaker, and leads Convince & Convert, a group of strategic advisors who work with organizations to make digital marketing and customer experiences remarkable.

Convince & Convert is a top-shelf brand in our industry, so we were super excited when they chose Emma for their own email marketing. It was kind of like a star athlete choosing to go to your gym, or a world-class chef eating at your restaurant. And since they’re pros at this stuff, here’s a little peek at their expert email strategy.

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What does email marketing at convince & convert look like?

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Convince & Convert’s email strategy primarily revolves around their main newsletter, Definitive. They describe it as “high-grade digital marketing guidance, topically sorted, and curated to the max.” At this point, over 40,000 people have opted into receiving the newsletter every Monday through Thursday.

Jess Ostroff, Convince & Convert’s Managing Editor, said, “Our strategy is a little different than the typical brand because we’re not really trying to sell anything – we’re trying to build up an audience.”

She’s found tailoring their communications to their individual recipients has been instrumental to that goal.

“Subscribers now have the option to choose which type of content within the digital marketing realm they want to receive, and it’s been incredibly helpful for us to segment out those different audiences. I also love looking at our click map and seeing which piece of content in each newsletter is getting the most engagement.”

Acting on that data has been crucial when it comes to practicing what they preach as a marketing company and serving their audience the most relevant content possible.

 

How does it fit into their larger strategy?

“The goal of our daily emails is to establish thought leadership for Convince & Convert and create an avenue for our paid sponsors to get visibility,” said Kelly Santina, Convince & Convert’s Head of Operations and Media.

But their team is highly selective about who (and what) they’ll include in each newsletter.

“We have paid sponsor slots in the newsletter, and we only work with sponsors whose messages we really believe in. The idea is that if we build trust with our audience, they’ll engage with the content because we haven’t proven our content to be valuable. We promote things that are relevant and useful, like a free download of an eBook, that are directly related to what our audience might want from a social media advisory company.”

What’s next?

Though they’ve already set up a welcome series, Jess and Kelly can’t wait to start amping up their automation.

“Now that our audience is getting so big and comes from so many places, they don’t always know everything there is to know about our brand, who Jay is, and all the things we do,” Jess said.

The solution? “We’re putting together an automated drip campaign that will help subscribers surface the resources that might be useful to them – for instance, telling people who signed up from a blog post about our podcast. It’s all about educating people in the most user-friendly way possible.”

Why Emma? 

“We’ve used 4 or 5 different email platforms over the years,” said Kelly, “and it’s always interesting to see how they’re different. Emma’s success team has been very helpful in tailoring our campaigns to our audience.”

They’ve also been incredibly impressed with their customer experience. (That’s a huge score for us, coming from people who literally write books on this stuff!)

“I feel like we’re still learning a lot, and your support team has been awesome every time we’ve had any sort of question or need help learning how to do something. It’s been really nice working with people who genuinely want to see us succeed.”

Want access to Convince & Convert’s newsletter, Definitive? (Pro tip: You do!) Sign up here.

TOOLKIT

With automation, reaching the right people with the right message at just the right time is a breeze.

An entire team of email specialists obsessed with driving the results you care about.

Power highly targeted campaigns using segmentation to organize and manage your subscriber data.

Our Case Studies 

We love our customers & they love us, too! 

Not only did using Emma help us improve our emails – it also helped us tailor programs to better meet the needs and interests of our students.

Angie & Collin

Assistant Director of Student Activities, Student Affairs

Emma is a solid email marketing management platform that provided campaign performance insights, tracking, and a fair amount of customization. Additionally, building out an API so that it spoke to our personnel database made updating contact information and managing unsubscribes considerably easier.

Ben E.

Director of Communication, Higher Education

The fact that our store managers are able to log into Emma and feel comfortable creating emails really means a lot. That, plus the approvals process have saved us a ton of time and keep the brand on point—which is crucial.

Carl Dickerson

Digital Content Strategist

Emma has been a helpful tool for our organization. We recognize that students get inundated with emails so using Emma allows us to be more strategic and create messages that are more engaging to students.

Christian B.

Director of Housing, Higher Education

The best thing about Emma is that it is one of the most influential platforms for marketing and comes with great features. You cannot resist its impeccable ability to boost sales through the best email transactions.

James C.

Digital Marketing Manager

Emma allows you to send blast emails to different audiences. Emma’s “Segments” allow you to slice your contact list into different segments based on different criteria. Creating emails is fairly easy and it’s not too hard to make something look good. We use Emma to send ~ 300K emails at a time, which it does well.

Jeremy A.

Project Coordinator

The approvals dashboard has really knocked it out of the park: It saves us so much time and makes it seamless to manage over 1,000 studio newsletters each month.

Meredith Parks

Marketing Strategist

Emma enables us to design email campaigns that consistently reflect our organization’s brand, while also making it simple to switch between different templates tailored to various audiences. The insight dashboards provide valuable analytics, and the builder itself is both intuitive and user-friendly.

Katie M.

Marketing Manager

We are much happier with it in comparison to our formal software Constant Contact – the customer service is just more responsive, and the interface is so easy to use that we are able to have interns use with little direction.

Monica S.

Marketing, Marketing and Advertising

I really like the email editors and ability to create segments based on your data. The Emma team is great about helping set up external APIs in order for your data to get automatically added into their system.

Nikki R.

Digital Marketing Manager

The thing I like most about Emma is how easy things are to manage. The UI is laid out in a way that makes it very straightforward to get what you need to do, done.

Trevor A.

Founder, Marketing and Advertising

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Want to see how they did it?

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