MgmtCo’s newsletters reached 200,000 CEOs
This global management consulting firm had built an email list of 200,000 executives with an impressive open rate. It was a success by most measures. Yet the marketing team was dissatisfied. They could only manage to send 350 emails per year and those emails were drab. This is because prior, the strong-willed partners would line-edit and quibble and cause weeks of painful rework. To reduce all that feedback, they’d build a system to auto-assemble emails by sucking in already approved copy and thumbnails from the website. It worked. But it also left no room for editorializing, cross-promoting, or commenting on the news.
The marketing team wondered how they could invite some of their bold voice back.
The firm found Fenwick through a white paper we’d written about newsletters. They hired us for consulting phases that lasted two years which resulted in a suite of five beautiful email templates that echoed their ambition—elegant, editable, rich, and yet not much more work. Recipients glowed and favorably compared their new style to Fortune and The Economist. The email team drew the whole company’s attention as all practices started asking for more.
“Chris and the team helped us craft a compelling vision for our email newsletter program. They guided us in defining the right voice and tone while designing original, on-brand layouts—both of which we wouldn’t have been able to develop internally. The work was a big success, elevating our email marketing efforts and making me look good in the process!”
Executive
RESULTS
2 projects
5 newsletter templates
10% higher opens firm-wide
17% more clicks
It started with a study
This story actually started years prior. Fenwick signed up for 100 B2B newsletters to produce a study where we grouped the senders into archetypes with a cheeky writeup about our disappointment: 13% never sent anything. Most “just forwarded links” with no context. Three years later, the person running email marketing at MgmtCo found the paper and asked to chat. They’d arrived at much the same conclusions: “We recognize ourselves in the ‘forwarding the mail’ archetype. Nothing’s broken. Opens are high. But we know it can be better.”
Together, we kicked off a multi-year project.
Consulting the consultants
In engaging us, MgmtCo’s marketing leadership wanted to nudge the firm’s many partners out of day-to-day marketing decisions. Though experts in their respective fields, the partner requests were tearing the company’s campaigns apart, to no benefit. They’d insist the marketers redact something or not send an email to one client in particular out of an overabundance of caution. Hence, the marketing team built a homegrown email system to skirt all feedback.
MgmtCo is one of the biggest management consultancies and is often hired by Fortune 100 executives who need their research and strategy support to, say, argue for the company to transform or reorganize. The client may already know the direction, but needs MgmtCo to confirm and make the case. Months into the engagement, it occurred to us at Fenwick that we’d been brought in for much the same reason—to help the marketing team make their case internally.
The old guard partners weren’t allowing the MgmtCo team to modernize their email workflows and insisted they write for clicks—not to build long-term trust and relationships. MgmtCo’s marketing team knew this. Fenwick supplied the message.
Under the marketing team’s guidance, Fenwick launched a strategy project to step back and explore the most fundamental question: Why even send email in the first place? What should that company-to-customer relationship even be? We built a custom database of thousands of emails to see what we were competing with and what their audience was receiving. We interviewed dozens of people at every stage of email creation within the company, as well as found our own lookalike recipients to interview. This research convinced us that busy executives needed a different style of emails—and it would require clearer writing and design.
We strained those insights through the filter of all the internal motives each team had for email—who wanted to send what to which recipients? Step-by-step, approval-by-approval, how was that happening today? We built a vast diagram and through this learned that the editorial and design teams would love to be invited back into the email creation process, if only it could be made practical.
Selling the idea of the inbox as a homepage
The first real delivery milestone was a presentation where we armed the marketing team to argue for an email format that contained the entire article. No links. Because, what was linking out but a game to earn traffic? We aimed to give their busy executive readers what they wanted—a cleaner experience by saving them a click.
The CMO took it up to the managing partner and steering committee, and that argument won the day. We began writing MgmtCo’s emails in the new, more aggressively opinionated style with clear, crisp insights. We expanded that into a set of emails they could start to implement with very little coding work to test. And test they did. Over months, they pored through every part from the new subject line convention, header, body, and graphics to confirm piece by piece which parts worked, and together, to iterate.
The concern, then, was how would they implement an email system that required more writing from an editorial team already stretched thin? And from a design team already busy? Which led to the next phase of work.
We turned those concepts into a full system
In the final phase, we defined the exact email templates and their respective purposes, and gave them a design upgrade in line with the company’s newest brand system. We ran time studies to get some of the longer emails down to just two hours of writing work. And with design, we produced a flight of graphical modules that were coded into a template builder so non-designers could crop images and edit quotes, and thus only ask for design help when necessary.
We commemorated all this work on a one-page flowchart to guide on which format to use when. We created a 90-page deck detailing all of our findings and two derivative decks, teaching various teams only what they needed to know to participate and request emails.
Throughout, the MgmtCo team did an uncommonly effective job of guiding us, translating requests, and tying all this work back to their CRM and marketing automation system. They evaluated and launched an email editor tool that could accommodate our designs, and we packaged, delivered, and helped oversee that coding. Tirelessly, they explained this work in methodical detail to the rest of the business, and through these two years, guided the company step-by-step to publishing truly notable insights, fast, in a format that felt pleasantly magazine-like.
The whole company took it up
MgmtCo now has a system of five email templates made of dozens of pre-built modules in a friendly email editor. But we prefer to measure success in the uptake: 100% of practices throughout wanted to use it. They’d see other practices publishing high-design emails getting more reads and clicks and they’d ask for the same.
In its own humble way, this work helped the marketing team change the culture of email—thanks in no small part to our point of contact, the person who ran the email team. Because in true consulting fashion, while we delivered the message, it conveyed what that executive who found our white paper had known all along.
