Semrush increases active email users by 200% YoY and paying customers via email by 33% with Adobe Marketo Engage
For marketing professionals around the world, Semrush is a top name in online visibility management. From SEO analysis to content management and competitive research, the company offers more than 55 online marketing tools as a cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) platform. With multiple free and paid tiers of service and a rapidly growing customer base, the Semrush internal digital marketing team needs to reach those customers and build meaningful and useful marketing communications.
After increasing revenue by more than 50% in 2021, Semrush had outgrown its old email platform. The team wanted a more robust marketing automation platform that would allow them to reach customers and prospects on a more personal level by adjusting content for multiple factors, including marketing knowledge, location, professional focus area, and account history with the company.
After researching several marketing automation platforms, Semrush ultimately chose Adobe Marketo Engage to manage email marketing communications with its sizable customer base of 3.2 million email subscribers.
Reaching millions with dynamic personalization
Semrush has many types of customers — from major retailers keeping track of the competition and marketing consultants guiding clients with the latest market research to small business owners trying to do it all. By developing a deeper understanding of individual customers and the tools they need through dynamic personalization, the company can promote features that address unique challenges across its broad customer base. For example, instead of sending the same monthly newsletter to everyone, they can rearrange and highlight content to appeal to a variety of unique interests.
“We want to personalize customer journeys with dynamic content as much as possible to help our customers and prospects find the tools and features that meet their marketing needs. Marketo Engage has the flexibility and scalability we need to deliver personalization at scale.”
Olga Denisova
Vice President of Digital Marketing, Semrush
Scaling with automation at lightning speed
The secret to implementing dynamic personalized emails across a large subscription base is data and automation. Marketo Engage connects dozens of data sources, including their Salesforce CRM, Semrush data, and other platforms to gather insights and better understand the customer journey.
Semrush marketers reorganized its working approach to streamline incoming requests and build a new set of approved templates and dynamic tokens in the marketing automation platform. This approach systemized the team’s email, landing page, and form creation.
For example, rather than building endless variations of onboarding flows to account for users’ in-tool activity, marketers use tokens to dynamically populate tailored content that reflects the readers’ experience to date. As a result of this automated and personalized approach, the YoY scale and engagement rates skyrocketed with an increase of 119% in the number of sends, 147% in the number of opens, and 105% in the number of clicks.
The team can also choose from one of the 10 approved templates to launch a landing page in a day — a process that could previously take weeks. These time savings allow marketers to focus on content instead of code while still creating landing pages that are designed well, load quickly, and respond promptly.
“For Semrush, the key value of Marketo Engage is that it empowers us with a marketing ecosystem that is extensive in functionality, scalable, and highly flexible,” says Denisova. “It allows us to automate repetitive tasks and free up time for higher priority projects. Perhaps more importantly, it ignites conversation about new approaches and ideas that we might not have realized before. And that’s key to our growth.”
Breaking records in revenue and engagement
Marketing automation has helped the Semrush digital marketing team contribute to strong growth within the company’s marketing organization. Since rolling out the platform and innovating its email strategy, the company has increased paying customers by 33% via email programs with a 200% year-over-year increase in active email users. While the number of emails has increased by 35%, the strategic use of personalization has helped emails better connect with users, leading to a 30% climb in open rates and a 30% drop in unsubscribe actions.
Learn more about how Adobe Marketo Engage can help companies across industries boost engagement — and growth — with marketing automation.
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