Blackbaud
How a cloud software company influenced over $100,000 in pipeline with one email nurture campaign
Lisa Kenney, Senior Demand Generation Marketing Manager for Blackbaud’s Arts and Culture Group was faced with a problem she needed to solve: an outdated, underperforming and exhausted email nurture campaign. She ultimately did it by repurposing top-notch content and providing an enhanced content experience through email and on the Blackbaud website using Uberflip. The new campaign quickly led to $100,000 in new pipeline, and a 42% increase in opportunity-to-deal conversions for one of Blackbaud’s flagship products—not to mention a better understanding of content engagement and ROI. Kenney’s experience and success in her segment paved the way for the implementation of Uberflip across Blackbaud’s marketing organization.
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 organizations and empowers them to increase their impact through software, services, expertise, and data intelligence. One of the company’s leading fundraising management solutions, Blackbaud Raiser Edge NXT (RE NXT) was the subject of Kenney’s demand generation efforts. The goal of the nurture 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, Kenney and her team first sought to better understand their buyer. They needed a solid story and a content experience that encouraged prospects to self-educate and move faster along the buyer journey. Knowing that their prospects relied heavily on fundraising events, they needed to convey how to leverage RE NXT before, during, and after an event. They worked with a focus group of fundraisers within arts and cultural organizations to help the team create content containing useful tips and steps for leveraging RE NXT during the event planning process.
Looking to build a perfect content experience
Kenney designed a Marketo campaign consisting of 12 emails, each focusing on a blog post containing tips and insights collected from the focus groups. In addition, she curated relevant content that already existed in Blackbaud’s resource center. To create an engaging content destination for each of her emails, she packaged the content all together in an Uberflip Marketing Stream. The result was a single content destination for the Master How You Mingle campaign.
With the stream, called Shake, Smile and Mingle, acting as the destination for all emails, Lisa could now send prospects to a single item from each email but also offer a complete self-serve content experience. If they wanted to consume more relevant content, it was right there at their fingertips. Furthermore, if they nurtured themselves to a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) state, they were removed from the email nurture completely.
“If I didn’t have Uberflip, I’d really be struggling to prove ROI on my content. With the combination of Uberflip, Marketo and BrightFunnel, I can see what’s working and what’s not to determine a strategy for my next piece of content. I would recommend Uberflip to anyone who wants a content hub that integrates very well into their tech stack.”
– Lisa Kenney, Senior Demand Generation Marketing Manager, Blackbaud
Delivering personalization based on intent
With Uberflip AI, Kenney could serve up even more targeted content to each prospect, encouraging them to continue engaging with more related assets. Better yet, by leveraging Uberflip’s integration with Bombora, an industry-leading intent data platform, she could deliver personalized recommendations based on each visitor’s intent. Once the campaign launched, Kenney found that prospects were consuming more—on average, seven pieces of content per visit or three times more than before.
Kenny was also able to deliver this same content experience, right on the Blackbaud RE NXT product page. With Site Engager, she could serve up personalized content recommendations to visitors as they scrolled through the web page—even when if attempted to exit.
The success that Kenney saw in overhauling the nurture campaign with a better content experience was an eye-opener to the other Blackbaud marketers, each responsible for their own market segments. “After seeing the results, my marketing colleagues were determined to incorporate Uberflip AI recommendations and the embedding feature into their own campaigns,” said Kenney. Across all 15 marketing groups, the Blackbaud marketers were able to show $51 million in pipeline influenced by their content.
Uberflip has the recipe for building a great content experience
While the content experience provided by the Blackbaud’s Uberflip Hub was an important part of the success of the Master How You Mingle and other Blackbaud campaigns, Uberflip has also proved its worth to Kenney and the rest of the marketing team in other ways.