Challenge
Keap’s SaaS-based sales and marketing automation software helps small business owners manage everything from landing pages on their website to text appointment reminders. Their customer base is largely service-based businesses that lack the staff and technical know-how to create traditional marketing campaigns. Keap sells them, as well as marketing services firms that support them, a simple and easy way to attract and convert new customers.
One of the key features is the ability to create automated email marketing sequences with templates and easy-to-understand set-up wizards. Companies can quickly segment leads and create curated emails for each group to keep their audience engaged, nurtured, and moving closer to a sale.
Maintaining email deliverability is key to Keap’s success and the company spends significant resources ensuring their customers’ messages reach their prospects. A key challenge is that leading email service providers are constantly adjusting their algorithms to keep junk mail out of their users’ inboxes. This led to a major crisis for Keap when Yahoo started flagging emails from the Keap domain as spam, making it nearly impossible for Keap’s 125,000 customers to generate sales from prospects with a Yahoo email address. Keap needed a crisis communications response that would protect its customer and partner relationships while keeping news of this crisis from becoming public.
Industry
Technology
SaaS Software
Services
Communication Strategy
Crisis Communications
Social Media Campaigns
Key Result
Only 2 customers lost
due to the issue
Approach
Over 10 weeks, Rob McMurtrie led a response team of comms managers, customer service leaders, engineers and partner marketers to mitigate the crisis. The first step was setting up active monitoring of the company’s official and unofficial community groups on Facebook where there was active conversation about the issue to identify topics to address and flag individual conversations to customer service managers for follow-up.
The complexity of the issue meant that Keap needed to not only carefully explain the problem but also establish the company as an ally to their customers. Rob started by adjusting the language the engineering team was using to describe the challenge. Instead of calling it an “email deliverability” issue, which implied the fault lie with Keap, stakeholders were counseled to adopt the phrase “email acceptance” problem to properly assign the blame to Yahoo.
“No one’s giving a ‘free pass’ but most are mis-directing their blame. Keap isn’t the major component to the problem here and they have limited control over inbox providers… they are not the reason it happened nor are they at fault for it.” – Keap partner in Facebook Community Group
The next challenge was to find ways to give customers a sense of control over their situation. Because the solution would require multiple weeks of Keap curating which customer mail was delivered to Yahoo in order to retrain the algorithm, we needed to improve the quality of our customer’s emails to comply with Yahoo’s standards. The team launched an education effort using bi-weekly emails and Facebook posts crafted by Rob and team to not only explain what was happening but also to empower customers by sharing email marketing best practices that would improve the chances their email would be accepted by Yahoo. We also activated the partner channel to help validate what we were saying, address customer questions and concerns, and provide solutions and workarounds to keep their businesses moving forward.
Results
The well-coordinated response kept customers engaged and invested during the time it took the engineering team to build back Keap’s reputation score. Negative comments in the Facebook user groups disappeared after the crisis communications effort was activated. There was no coverage of the problems in the media and only 2 customers were lost as a result of the crisis.
About Keap
For more than 20 years, Keap has helped liberate and empower small business entrepreneurs so they can strengthen their families, communities and the global economy. Keap pioneered the sales and marketing automation software market with its Keap family of products, services to help small business owners market their businesses effectively, and expert coaching. Headquartered in Chandler, Arizona, the company is on a mission to simplify growth for 1 million entrepreneurs worldwide by 2030.