The Company: Blackbaud

Blackbaud is the world’s leading cloud software company powering social good. Serving the entire social good community—nonprofits, foundations, corporations, education institutions, healthcare institutions, and individual change agents—Blackbaud connects and empowers organizations to increase their impact through software, services, expertise, and data intelligence.

The Problem: An Underperforming Email Nurture Campaign

In late 2016, Lisa Kenney, Senior Demand Generation Marketing Manager for Blackbaud’s Arts and Culture Group, inherited an underperforming, outdated, and exhausted email nurture for one of Blackbaud’s leading fundraising management solutions, Blackbaud Raiser Edge NXT (RE NXT).  

The goal of this campaign was to educate arts and cultural fundraisers on Blackbaud’s sophisticated, cloud-based fundraising platform and its intuitive user experience. To revitalize the campaign, Lisa needed key messaging that resonated with the type of fundraiser she wanted to target and a great experience to deliver the information.

The Solution: A Content Experience Accelerating Email Nurture Campaigns

To overhaul the campaign, Lisa needed to understand the type of fundraiser in her market. She knew her fundraisers relied on events, and she knew her email story needed to convey what to do before, during, and after an event. She created a focus group with people who worked in fundraising at arts and cultural organizations to help outline useful tips and steps for leveraging RE NXT during the event planning process. The nurture campaign was renamed to Master How You Mingle.

It didn’t take long for Lisa to decide that Uberflip was the solution for building out the perfect content experience to complement her RE NXT email nurture.

Combining Email Marketing With Uberflip Nurture Streams

The final nurture consisted of nine weekly emails, with nineteen corresponding resources that included an event planning checklist, free data scorecards, customer stories, white papers, datasheets, and demos. These resources were collected into the Master How You Mingle Uberflip Marketing Stream.

The email copy was turned into nine blog posts and published within an Uberflip Marketing Stream called Shake, Smile and Mingle. The articles were embedded into her campaign landing page and added to the campaign Marketing Stream. These resources and articles followed the flow of the email nurture.  

Lisa’s premium content and resources in the Marketing Stream implemented a gated Form CTA that was set up with lead scoring in Marketo. Visitors who opened the email and consumed multiple pieces of content would convert to a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and because of the content experience, she found contacts were nurturing themselves faster.

Using Artificial Intelligence to Nurture With Content

Lisa used Uberflip AI’s recommendation engine on the Shake, Smile and Mingle Marketing Stream to recommend content and drive traffic back to the main nurture stream. Lisa says, “After seeing the results, my marketing colleagues are determined to incorporate Uberflip AI recommendations and the embedding feature into their campaigns.”

The Results

The Marketing Streams leveraged for this nurture campaign saw high engagement rates, and strong contributions towards influencing sales pipeline. Since the campaign launched, the emails have quickly become the number one RE NXT pipeline influencer for her market, influencing more than $100,000 in pipeline and counting. In Q4 2017, the emails themselves contributed to a 33% opportunity to deal conversion rate.

But that’s not all! By leveraging Uberflip for campaigns, in 2017 alone, Blackbaud’s Arts and Cultural Resource Hub influenced $4.3 million in pipeline and $3.1 million in bookings. Not to mention, across all 14 Hubs Uberflip has influenced over $51 million in pipeline. “If I didn’t have Uberflip, I’d really be struggling to prove ROI on my content. Uberflip is totally where it’s at. I can’t believe other companies aren’t doing content experiences like this,” said Lisa.