MINDBODY finds a way to make email creation stress-free

“MINDBODY’s critical mission is to ensure our all-in-one software takes the stress out of the day-to-day management of our customers’ businesses so they can focus on what they do best – create remarkable experiences for wellness-seekers,” Nat Harrison, MINDBODY’s Vice President, Marketing, said.

However, MINDBODY’s marketers did not have the time to focus on creating highly targeted, highly relevant emails that would engage their customers and appeal to prospects. How they were building emails ate up all available time to be strategic.

Even though MINDBODY is the established market leader in wellness technology – a multi-billion dollar industry – the company constantly looks for ways to surprise and delight users of its business management software. Theirs is a highly competitive space that requires strategic focus and production efficiency.

A priority was to be able to create emails that had as much of a 1:1 type of communication as possible. MINDBODY’s software scales in functionality as the business using it scales. It was common for customers to use different combinations of features based on their business’ maturity. Further, fitness businesses had different functionality needs than those in beauty and different from those in wellness.

It was imperative to have email messaging related to the given industry and the maturity stage of each customer. Emails had to address each subscriber’s unique needs and interests to properly inform or prompt them to a specific action. This demanded a high level of personalization.

MINDBODY’s core team of email creators was handling a range of B2B communications across several divisions of the company. Those email types included marketing, product marketing, pricing and packing notices, customer-support, and research.

Even in the best possible scenario, that’s a lot of email creation, which becomes even more of a challenge when segmentation and personalization are brought into play. As it were, the hand-coding method used to create emails yielded just 10 to 15 emails per month and often did not have the sort of spot-on messaging well-done personalization can deliver. 

They would need more than tweaking the status quo of their email creation process to solve their problem. MINDBODY needed to find a way to democratize email creation – one that would free up their core email team to focus on strategy and not be buried in production work. The belief was by spreading out creation – while maintaining control of brand guidelines, deliverability, and tracking best practices – more and better emails could be created faster.

The challenge was obvious: find a method to let them check off all the boxes in MINDBODY’s new and better email creation process. That meant, along with distributing email creation to more teams – most of whom knew nothing about HTML coding – what was used to produce all those emails had to be very user-friendly. And not just the basics of email creation but also sophisticated processes like personalization.

One reason MINDBODY achieved and has maintained leadership of its software category is a willingness to innovate, not on a whim but after careful analysis. Moving to an entirely new way of creating emails called for not only an innovative method but one with proven performance.

After evaluating several options, MINDBODY saw the Stensul Governed Creation™ Platform as their solution for their current and, importantly, future needs.

It checked off all their boxes and then some.

• There was ample evidence of massive time-savings achieved by companies like MINDBODY in highly competitive, fast-moving markets.
• Ease of use was unparalleled such that MINDBODY personnel could create quality, production-ready emails minutes after they saw the Stensul Email Builder for the first time.
• Brand and compliance guidelines were programmable and robust, ensuring emails would always be on-brand and compliant with the company’s and regulatory requirements.
• Core email team members would have end-to-end visibility into all email builds underway in the Stensul platform.
• Review & approvals could be done with speed and certainty.
• Personalizing emails with Dynamic Content could be easily done, even by novice email creators.
• Stensul was ESP/MAP agnostic, eliminating the time and expense of redoing email templates as well as helping to enhance the performance of adjacent technology in MINDBODY’s martech stack.

“The time-savings we gained with Stensul have given us time to pursue new opportunities,” Harrison said. “For example, we were able to undertake a large-scale collaboration with our Partnership team to re-introduce a multi-faceted ‘Better Together’ campaign. Our Demand Generation unit now has the time to strategize new prospecting campaigns that trigger dynamically.”

Email creation time is now 16x less than before Mindbody implemented Stensul. Their ability to handle email requests rose 26x – soon after the platform was in place.

MINDBODY launched a multi-quarter email campaign using the Dynamic Content functionality to send hyper-targeted, relevant, and timely email variations to their customers based on their specific product adoption. A large-scale, global campaign that had to be produced within a very tight timeframe was handled by a two-person team. “It was possible because we simplified our email personalization in Stensul through its Dynamic Content functionality,” Harrison said.

“The review and commenting process in Stensul is helpful as it lets reviewers quickly QA from a single screen,” Harrison said. “The platform’s integration with the company’s Slack messaging system and email notifications to various people involved in the email program affords flexibility and convenience, helping to move an email to final approval and deployment smoothly.”

“We appreciate the dynamic that we have with the Stensul team,” Harrison said. They make us aware of new functionality that fits well with what we’re doing or where we need to go marketing content creation-wise. They act on our feedback and provide phenomenal support as we find new, creative ways to surprise and delight our customers and stay at the head of our market.”