The Process
We started working with Tespo in November 2020 to revamp their email marketing. The first step was auditing all their email accounts. This audit involved checking the domain Spam reports and blacklist activity. An email blacklist is when servers have labeled your domain as high risk. Being flagged for spam limits your ability to reach a user’s email inbox. Through our audit, we discovered several ways to improve their domain reputation.
One of the first challenges we had to solve was the deliverability issues. We identified some spam reports and blacklists that affected their email deliverability. Being blacklisted can have a negative impact and stop your emails from reaching the user. Repairing email domains with spam history is difficult. But with the right strategy, you can restore a poor domain to health. It takes patience and consistency with engaging high-quality contacts.
Low deliverability can happen for a variety of preventable reasons. In this case, we discovered many emails were being sent to users daily. Additionally, there was no contact cleaning and management plan in place. We implemented a contact cleaning and segment management plan to prevent future harm. Entreprov identified and removed the bad emails before the migration. Bad emails can consist of soft, hard bounces, unsubscribes, or spam reports.
Our next challenge was merging the data from two companies into a single CRM. Having two companies with different processes and CRM’s created a ton of contact management challenges. We provided the client with clarity on what needed to happen and how they could help. Tespo needed guidance on picking a CRM, contact management, and a game plan for the migration. We asked Tespo to collect any relevant information known about the contact history. Knowing about how the contacts were acquired and contact list age is critical. Knowing the state of the contacts provides clarity on how to improve the contact health.
As for CRM’s, we chose Active Campaign as a central solution to merge both companies’ contacts. We chose Active Campaign because of its reliability, deliverability, and segmentation features. Having a tool that can simplify complex segmentation needs is a must. Active Campaign is known for having a great deliverability reputation. We wanted to give Tespo the best chance of recovering the health of their domain. And once the domain health improves, we could optimize engagement through segmentation.
After choosing the CRM we developed a step-by-step plan of what needed to be done. Our first step was developing the segmentation strategy for list management. Every contact we added to the system needed to have a defined place. This meant adding every contact to a list or labeling that contact in a segment. This was a collaborative process as we needed to develop a new naming convention for list management.
Next, we removed all bad contacts to improve deliverability and open rates. There are a bunch of tools you can use to clean lists with bad contacts. The goal with list cleaning is to identify the high-risk and soft/hard bounce contacts. Once the contact lists were cleaned, we started the migration to Active Campaign.
Upon launching the migration, we faced an issue with the number of old lists from the previous systems. There were dozens of segments created that needed to be redefined or deleted. We worked with the Tespo team to remove or redefine each list. There were over 70 lists of contacts that needed to be evaluated. In total these 70 lists contained over 1 million contacts.
We implemented the new list and contact segment structure once the lists were cleaned. Our goal here was to provide a framework that simplified segmentation moving forward. We created a segmentation system that works with complex and simple accounts. It’s an excel document that clients can use moving forward to maintain clean contact hygiene. Within this document, we define, tag structure, and list names with clear definitions. This benefits the client as they hire new team members that can follow the documentation.
Finally, we created the integrations between their eCommerce sites and Active Campaign. This included a variety of tools such as WooCommerce, Shopify Typeform, and more. Our goal was to capture all contact engagement in a single place. We wanted to ensure email campaigns attached to sales continued to run.
Migration Results
- We merged two accounts with 500k plus a piece into a single account before the deadline.
- Tespo was able to track sales from both eCommerce at the same time in a single location.
- Contacts were segmented based on activity and by company
- Their team was able to integrate different apps for both companies using Activecampaign.
- In the middle of the year, the company purchased another business and was able to join everything in the same Activecampaign account without losing time and money.
