CommonBond Email Case Study
Introduction
By the end of 2015, the marketing team at CommonBond was confident that one of their
priorities for early 2016 was to curate and share a cohesive brand story. There was no doubt
about it: the financial services landscape was, and would continue to be, a cluttered mass of
traditional banks and emerging financial technology players. While the CommonBond marketing
team was confident in their positioning and brand story, they knew they needed to communicate
it clearly and consistently across multiple marketing channels from their website, to content, to
affiliate websites, to email.
Email marketing was a critical vehicle for communicating the CommonBond brand story. The
team was aware of the fact that email messages are by far consumers’ preferred method of
receiving commercial messages from companies. CommonBond’s two primary target segments,
inschool
MBAs seeking student loans and student loan refinancers seeking to find a lower
interest rate responded well to email with strong open and clickthrough
rates. As CommonBond
sought to grow throughout 2016, the team was cognizant that the need to consistently
communicate via email as well as launch new products to different target markets would impact
their email marketing strategy.
The CommonBond Back Story
CommonBond was founded in November 2011 by David Klein, Michael Taormina, and Jessup
Shean, who met at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. The idea for
the company was sparked by the founders’ frustration with the lack of affordable loan options to
fund their own graduate school education.
The trio put together a business plan and were accepted to the highly selective Wharton
Venture Initiation Program, which serves as a startup
incubator for Wharton students who are
pursuing their entrepreneurial passions. The team piloted their business model at Wharton,
lending to Wharton MBA students and recent graduates.
Following their pilot in 2012, the team made great strides in expanding their product offerings,
enabling CommonBond to help a larger population of members. A quick summary is below.
● 2013: CommonBond expanded to 20 MBA programs across the country.
● 2014: CommonBond expanded its student loan refinancing and consolidation programs
to graduates of law, medical, and engineering programs.
● 2015: CommonBond expanded its student loan refinancing program to almost all
undergraduate and graduate schools in the United States.
Locking Down an Email Marketing Process & Strategy
The team spent a great deal of time at the end of 2015 and in the beginning of 2016 stepping up
their email marketing efforts by refreshing their email creation process and content strategy.
Process
Process was becoming increasingly important as CommonBond grew as a company, and email
grew as a priority communication vehicle. Process would enable the team to think through and
align on each email’s objective, target market, content, and layout. Borrowing from team
members’ past experience, they began to meet weekly to hash out critical components of
upcoming emails. Key details were documented in a shared document that was updated by
members throughout the week. As copy and layout evolved, all inputs were updated in the a
“Content Request Form” document (see a sample here ). The document empowered the team to
push projects forward and gain alignment quickly.
Targeting The Right Customers
Fortunately, CommonBond had collected thousands of customer email addresses since the
company’s inception. They had been using those email addresses to target customers with
transactional and content emails alike, but needed to review who they were contacting and how
frequently. The team had collected four separate email lists:
● Members: Members of the CommonBond community who had successfully taken out a
loan with the company.
● Pipeline: Applicants who were in the process of completing a CommonBond loan
application, but who had not yet successfully booked a CommonBond loan.
● Events: CommonBond team members worked hard to curate inoffice
events that
welcomed members and nonmembers
into their workspace for panels on career
switching, fireside
chats on the financial technology (or fintech) industry, and happy
hours. These activities generated a separate events email list. The people on the events
list may benefit from receiving additional email communications from CommonBond.
● ∙ Friends & Family: Investors and quite literally, friends and family of the CommonBond
team comprised another list.
Understanding the various email lists CommonBond had access to was the first step to targeting
the right customer for each email. The team discussed how in the past, emails were sent to one
group specifically:
● Members typically received content emails.
● Applicants in the pipeline typically received transactional emails encouraging them to
complete their application.
● Events attendees typically received thank you notes for attending events as well as
additional event invitations.
● Friends & Family only sporadically received email when the company had news or
milestones to share.
After surveying the lists, it seemed that content emails could be relevant to each of the different
segments. Just because an applicant hadn’t become a CommonBond member by completing
their application, there was no reason they wouldn’t find the financial planning or careers
content the team published via content emails useful. Similarly, members who hadn’t attended a
previous event may find value in learning about each event CommonBond had scheduled, as a
future topic may be compelling.
The team realized there was ample opportunity to target different customer segments with
similar types of information and ultimately reach more members and potential members with
their emails.
Defining Email Objectives
Identifying clear objectives for each target segment was a critical step in enabling the team to
determine what types of content should be sent via email. Looking across the various customer
segments (members, pipeline, events, and friends & family), it was clear that each segment had
different objectives that email could serve.
Thinking through this enabled the team to come to the following conclusions:
Segment Objective Relevant Emails
CommonBond Members Engage
members with the
CommonBond Community
including events, contests,
and services
Newsletters
Event
emails
Announcement
emails
Pipeline Share
CommonBond value
proposition to drive
consideration
Encourage
pipeline to
complete application
Provide
information on
refinancing
Drip
campaigns
Newsletters
Announcement
emails
Event Attendees Share
CommonBond value
proposition to drive
consideration
Engage
attendees with
CommonBond community
including events, contests,
and services
Newsletters
Event
emails
Announcement
emails
Friends & Family Share
updates on
company milestones and
growth
Announcement
emails
Creating an Email Calendar For Content Emails
Creating an email calendar for content emails was critical. This enabled the team to proactively
identify who they were reaching, and when, throughout the month. The team set out to create a
3month
rolling email calendar that highlighted each of the different content and events emails
they sought to create. This way, they had plenty of time to clearly align on the objectives of each
email, the target population, and the send date. In addition, the threemonth
lead time gave
them sufficient time to work through the content of each email using the Content Request Form
document while still allowing sufficient time for email design development and reviews.
Critical Challenges Going Forward
As February began, the team was feeling comfortable with the process to plan content emails in
advance. It was clear that the advanced planning had paid off: the emails the team had
produced since they had put their new process in place felt like some of the strongest in the
company’s history, with strong open and click through rates (see examples below).
● 2015 Year in Review Email: Click to view example
○ Key Metrics
■ Open Rates: 48.2%
■ Click To Open Rates: 7.9%
■ Unsubscribes: 0.6%
● January 2016 Community Email: Click to view example
○ Key Metrics
■ Open Rates: 43.8%
■ Click Through Rates: 4.1%
■ Unsubscribes: 2.1%
● January 2016 Newsletter Email: Click to view example
○ Key Metrics
■ Open Rates: 33.4%
■ Click To Open Rates: 15.6%
■ Unsubscribes: .05%
As CommonBond approached 2016, a year with new product launches in store, the team knew
this could mean diversifying their email content to meet the needs of multiple target markets.
Would new products mean creating entirely new content emails that had a different focus than
the student loan emails the team currently created and launched? When new products were
launched, how should the team determine if they warranted a new email communications
strategy? If the team chose, at any point, to begin to differentiate content based on the interests
of the target customer, what data and technology would they need to do so?
As the marketing team celebrated their success in creating high quality content emails, they
knew they couldn’t rest on their laurels for long. The fastpace
of a growing company required
that they learn from their challenges and successes and plan for the future.
