Email Discovery Check-In

Published
bec2efbf5f54722d08c7c4c031c1e84a-huge-emIn 2015, Blackbaud embarked on a journey of discovery with 18 CRM customers to discover what your email needs are, how BBIS and CRM Marketing Efforts meet those needs today and most importantly to learn about the pain points and challenges you have with sending email through CRM Marketing Efforts and BBIS. Customers ranged from those with small marketing programs to multi-site or federated organizations, from those who send less than 10 million emails a year to those sending upwards of 70 million emails a year. Some customers used BBIS to send all email, some send only through Marketing Efforts, and some used a combination of both. Some had looked at using BBIS and Marketing Efforts and opted to use a 3rd party tool. We talked to customers in the United States and Canada, and international customers in the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Hong Kong. If we printed all of our notes we likely would have killed at least 4 trees (good thing we like reading things electronically!) Throughout the process we got a plethora of feedback that we've been analyzing and prioritizing to make a better email experience in the future. This, combined with a technical analysis allowed us to make some concrete plans around the future of sending email through BBIS and Marketing Efforts. Read on to learn more about upcoming changes and long-term plans for how to better enable you to send your important marketing messages to your constituents.

Analysis Synopsis
Our analysis showed that our current tools had become outdated and don't offer all of the features that you are looking for. CRM customers have staff of many levels of expertise creating and sending emails.  Content creators don't always know HTML and can easily "break" the templates that are provided for them. WYSIWYG editors that make changes to source code input by developers can cause havoc and hours of troubleshooting for a design.  This means that we need the flexibility to accomodate both ends of the spectrum - a locked down way for non-developers to add content without breaking an email design, and an open way for developers to copy code from outside CRM and BBIS to bypass the WYSIWYG editor. A drag and drop editor was a common request. You told us that reporting was difficult on single emails, and it was time consuming (and almost impossible) to compare statistics between emails and that key functionality available in other tools was missing.

From a technical perspective, sending email directly out of an enterprise-sized database occasionally causes problems in bogging down CRM processes and integrating email data back into CRM - presumably to use in future email campaigns, can be problematic. As such, while we can make functional changes and add in features to the existing system, the better approach long term is to rewrite email from the ground up and send it outside of CRM.

While this is only a small portion of our overall analysis, these results have led us to a two-pronged approach to solving this problem - a short term appoach to address immediate issues and ease some of the existing pain, and a longer term approach that will replace the current ways to send email with a better, faster, more modern way of sending email communications to your CRM constituents.

Short Term Enhancements
We have already begun releasing short term enhancements to help ease some usability challenges and add key feature requests. We will continue to add new email features in upcoming 2016 and 2017 4.0 service packs. Below is a view of what has been released in SP8, and what is planned to release in SP9, SP10 and SP11 in 2016.
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We have additional items in research for inclusion into our 2017 BBIS roadmap:
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We will continue reassessing and reprioritizing as we continue to monitor Ideas voting and ongoing customer feedback.

Long Term Plan
Many of you that joined our February spotlight call or June's CRM Roadmap Update call may recall hearing about Blackbaud Sky. Blackbaud Sky. One of the things that Blackbaud Sky is, is a set of capabilties built as a microservice that can be adopted across Blackbaud products. Email is one capability that is being built in this Blackbaud Sky model, with a goal to not only offer complex email capabilities for the advanced user, but also allow for organizations with less complex requirements to be able to easily and quickly create and send email. Planning and development work has begun already on this key capability, and discovery findings from CRM customers and our discovery project were included as a key input.

Our ultimate plan is to have CRM customers like yourselves sending email to your CRM constituents and viewing reports through this Sky email microservice. This is not a single year plan, which is why we are continuing to move forward with our short term enhancements on the existing functionality through 2016 and 2017 while we work to bring a brand new email and multi-channel marketing tool to you. The ultimate goal is to have ONE way to send email, eliminating the complex decisions organizations are making today about when to send out of BBIS and when to send out of Marketing Efforts.

We are excited about this direction and will continue to share updates and previews throughout the upcoming months and into next year as we progress down this path!

Please reach out to me directly at samantha.mcguin@blackbaud.com if you have questions about our upcoming features and THANK YOU to all of our discovery participants! We would not be where we are today with this plan without your valuable input!

Samantha McGuin
Senior Product Manager
Blackbaud
samantha.mcguin@blackbaud.com
 

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