In conversation with Justin Price, Milwaukee Bucks' Email Marketing Manager, about how his team uses Movable Ink and Stensul to cut their production time in half.
What are the main goals your team aims to achieve with your email program?
To keep fans engaged and informed with every send, move fans down the funnel, and drive customers to take action to consume an intangible or tangible piece of our brand. Another main goal is to maximize tools to increase our efficiency given we’re a small (but mighty) email marketing team.
How much time has your team saved on average per email campaign since automating the email creation process with Movable Ink and Stensul?
We can build email campaigns 50% quicker using Movable Ink and Stensul in tandem. There’s no need for us to use Adobe Photoshop to edit content, save said content, upload said content to Movable Ink, and then push the final content to the email template in Stensul. Now we simply build the module directly inside of Movable Ink and update content on the fly, reference the block we built in Stensul using the Movable Ink integration and boom - all done.
Before implementing Movable Ink and Stensul, what were the main bottlenecks in your email production process, and how have you since addressed them?
The main bottlenecks were the creation of the email in a silo and the build of the email. We built the email’s framework using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Dreamweaver, saved the content locally, pushed the final content to our ESP, and then had to send the email out for review using a test attachment. Using Movable Ink and Stensul in tandem allows us to:
Build the email’s framework using Movable Ink (includes updating all creative and live text), push the final Movable Ink blocks to Stensul using an integration, share the email internally using the QA feature and preview link, and push the final approved email to our ESP from Stensul.
Like the Q&A? You'll love the case study.
See the Milwaukee Bucks' email campaigns in action.
Read it hereCan you share examples of quick wins or significant improvements in engagement metrics you've observed since integrating real-time data (like NBA API data, social feeds) into your emails?
Before using Movable Ink, we couldn’t build blocks that would update in real-time in our gameday emails and while not the worst experience for a customer, it did leave something to be desired. Implementing real-time stats keeps our fans informed no matter when they open our gameday emails!
How has the integration of Movable Ink and Stensul affected your workflow with other departments, such as IT or creative teams?
There’s less of a need for us to submit additional creative because we can utilize imagery and live text that’s on-brand and accessible right in Movable Ink. This in turn gives the creative team more time to work on other projects and gives us more freedom to deploy more on brand campaigns rapidly.
Based on your experience, what advice would you give to other marketing teams who are looking to enhance their email campaigns?
Broaden your horizon and take time to think about what you or someone on your team deals with to build an email campaign and get it out the door promptly. Yes, sticking with the status quo process might be easier because you don’t have to get up to speed on a new platform, but the goal is to maximize efficiency and hopefully drive more customer engagement.
When you think about your email program, think about everything from the actual campaign build to the QA process. When we started to utilize Stensul’s review feature, we saved so much time on unnecessary back and forth during the QA process and became much more aligned before the campaign was deployed. There are clearer lines of communication as a result of using Stensul’s review feature.