Providing a Helping Hand

One of Glazier’s main communications platforms is email. However, when Glazier came to Click Laboratory for help November 2016, they had some concerns about its marketing effectiveness. After having their best year of conversions in 2015, leadership was concerned about being able to repeat the success. Their conversions were about 25% lower than they were used to seeing, and the open rates of their emails were significantly lower.

Because it was at a critical time in the season, Click had a short amount of time to help them meet their goals.

Click began looking at the company from all angles, but focused primarily on the marketing aspect of it. We looked at the performance of email campaigns, social media and paid media (PPC). We began to peel back the layers of the onion to see what was different this season.

The first thing that we discovered was that Google Analytics was not set up properly, so that had to immediately be fixed to understand what was or was not working. This means that the data was not being collected accurately and it was difficult to get the right details for this year. Once resolved, Click dived into their email marketing campaigns to tease out more missing information.

What resulted was the discovery that although email campaigns were Glazier’s major driver in the previous year, the emails were not driving nearly the value that they should have been this year. Click worked with Glazier to focus on the content of the emails to increase open rates and conversions by regularly testing content types, email formats, email vendors and A/B testing copy.

Think of it this way: you want to keep the email list healthy not by focusing on sales, but by writing more content that shows the people on the list that you care about them. One of the ways we did that was to offer free tastes of The Vault by showing video and content in the site to get people to click on the call to actions.

However, the issue was not just in email. The email issue may have been a contributing factor, but was a composite of several things which were causing issues with conversions.

The group of people registered knew how to find the event and register for it, thanks to the emails, but what was keeping them from pulling the trigger and buying?

Digging Deeper

Glazier also wanted to complete a big spend on PPC. However, Click decided that the company should cut back. Glazier was getting traffic from paid media, but this traffic was not delivering quality conversions. Instead, we decided to move the budget to better converting channels.

Click made the decision to focus on being more personal with Glazier’s clients. Instead of focusing solely on email campaigns, we moved some of their conversations to social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to get more personal with possible buyers. We also helped create a smaller package so that schools with smaller budgets could have the opportunity to take advantage of the product without having to spend as much money.

The average total recipients from Glazier’s email campaigns stayed roughly the same for over a year. Click helped to increase total number of their opens by delivering a lot more emails that offered more informational content. The number of email opens grew by 220% in this year, when Click took over. Their click rate and open rate stayed roughly the same as their previous year, around 10-11%, but what improved the most was their conversion rates. From the 2016-2017 season, Click helped improve Glazier’s conversion rates dramatically. There was a 42% improvement in their overall conversion rates across all sources. Their email conversion rates increased by 45% from their campaigns.

For organic traffic, Glazier’s conversion rates grew by 26% and their direct traffic saw a 42% increase. So, this large gain in conversions showed that what Click was doing was working. The content was designed to get more people to convert.