Strategic segmentation leads to high engagement
Time to read: 2 minutes
TestingMom.com is an online educational resource that provides test-preparation and skill-building for pre-kindergarten through 8th grade students to help parents and students navigate and prepare for scholastic testing at an affordable price.
After navigating the complexities of New York City’s gifted and talented programs and schools with their own children, TestingMom.com co-founders, Karen Quinn and Michael McCurdy, decided to help other parents nationwide via an online portal.
TestingMom.com knows first-hand that education is a personal topic, both for students in gifted and talented programs, and for their parents. They look to email as a way to reach their audience at that level. What began as a few emails a week to their subscriber base, has grown into a sophisticated, time-coordinated system that is vital to the success of TestingMom.com’s subscription offering. Their email content includes:
- Practice questions
- Paid membership content
- Promotions for their IQ Fun Pack game
- Retention emails for existing customers
- Event notifications and details
“With paid search, we were limited by what we could say on a landing page. Email allows us to reach people on a personal level—to tell a story about another mom’s experience. What parent doesn’t want to better their child’s education? We have that in each email.”
Building relationships with segmentation
TestingMom.com’s subscriber base is made up of resourceful, tenacious, and smart parents focused on creating opportunities for their children. As a result, they offer high-value email content at the perfect time in order to serve them well.
By using the contact segmentation tools within Twilio SendGrid’s Marketing Campaigns, TestingMom.com imports data taken from customers at sign-up to create highly-targeted, dynamic recipient list segments.
For example, they can create a contact list segment for “Paid members, with preschool-aged children, in NYC.” These segments are then auto-updated each time TestingMom.com adds additional contacts that meet the list criteria.
Once a targeted segment has been created, subscribers can then opt-in to receive various email content at key points throughout the day, like mornings, after school, before bed, etc. By combining their dynamic segments with subscriber email preferences, TestingMom.com delivers their content when it matters most.
TestingMom.com began implementing these dynamic segments and sending content at targeted times during the day just 3 months ago. Since then, they’ve seen an immediate, positive impact in their subscriber engagement, conversions, and delivery:
“With Marketing Campaigns, our whole workflow has become much more dynamic, efficient, and productive. We’re able to create emails at a faster pace and reach customers even more frequently and accurately. It has allowed us to segment based on who our customers are and what they want — in turn allowing us to deliver highly relevant content at the right time for each subscriber.”
Engaging with their most engaged subscribers
TestingMom.com has also used the contact segmentation tool to implement another email strategy. They’ve used the tool to create segments based on the most recent sign-ups and are now targeting those new users with a survey and contest.
The tactic has been paying paid off. TestingMom.com has received feedback from their most engaged customers, helping them understand the key concerns these customers have about their children’s education.
The simple addition of that engagement variable to their existing segment allows them to identify and communicate with their most content-hungry subscribers—nurturing their relationship with these customers and creating extra revenue-opportunity.
Bottom line
When asked about Twilio SendGrid’s role at TestingMom.com, Max says, “Marketing Campaigns allow us to create and deliver more relevant content to our customers at the points in their day that drive tremendous engagement.“
Twilio SendGrid is the perfect match for TestingMom.com’s content delivery and marketing email needs because it’s:
- Targeted: Marketing Campaign’s segmentation allows TestingMom.com to quickly build targeted campaigns without valuable developer resources.
- Scalable: TestingMom.com can easily increase their email volume and trust that Twilio SendGrid can handle the load.
- Reliable: Compared to previous email providers, TestingMom.com has rarely had to reach out to support about deliverability or issues.
- Affordable: TestingMom.com is proud of their ability to offer best-in-class, affordable educational resources for their own subscribers—an attribute made even easier with Twilio SendGrid’s low-cost marketing features.
“Twilio SendGrid's easy-to-use API made the implementation of the segmentation seamless with no down time. By effectively targeting and segmenting our users we experienced an immediate impact to the bottom line while increasing our deliverability and lowering our unsubscribe rate.”
