Scaled Agile, Inc. Reduced Email Design Bottlenecks by 100% with Taxi for Email

With Bird’s Taxi solution powering their email ecosystem, different teams at Scaled Agile have complete autonomy over what goes into internal or external messaging.

Before Bird, administrators were anxious about giving access to users—one small change could cascade into a technical nightmare. Now, the sales and HR teams can make their own unique emails or campaigns without worrying about breaking anything or looping stakeholders in every time an edit is needed.

As a result, the marketing team is unblocked from tedious review tasks and can work on other initiatives that drive leads and revenue. As Lauren Clark, Partner Marketing Manager at Scaled Agile, put it, “The ease of collaboration takes a lot of the guesswork out of the process.”

“A good example of this in action is our HR onboarding email series called ‘Tip of the Day,’” she added. “New hires are sent 30 days' worth of emails with topics ranging from our wellness program to an email signature setup demo. Although we have cross-functional teams and contractors working on these emails, I’ve never had to look at a single one.”

“It’s a safe space for users to create, edit, and review together.”

Taxi significantly democratized the email rollout process across all of Scaled Agile’s business units. With more creators collaborating in one intuitive ecosystem, improvements are drastically noticeable in three main buckets.

1. The write-review-deploy email process is smoother and quicker

Using Taxi, the company has shrunk the turnaround time for email campaigns from several weeks to just a few hours. This improved agility enables Scaled Agile to get interconnected email campaigns and drips up and running in no time. Today, the company’s marketing and sales efforts are scalable and more competitive in the marketplace.

“Instead of having someone draft copy in a shared document, send it to a copywriter, then send it over to someone else for approval, we've reduced that cycle time drastically,” explained Lauren. “Employees just throw it in Taxi, share the email with somebody to get the necessary approvals, and you're done.”

A review process that lives in a single hosted URL location is the kind of optimized workflow you don’t typically see in marketing. “Usually, getting an email out can take a week or more, depending on the company's process,” added Eva. “With Taxi, I can get an email out in just a few hours.”

Unsurprisingly, Scaled Agile significantly increased its sent email volume across all its teams year-over-year with Taxi.

2. Deep customization and support are skyrocketing productivity

“Is it on brand?” is a question the Scaled Agile Marketing team no longer has to ask about their emails. Part of the reason email creation runs through several layers of marketing is that brand consistency is tough.

Manually ensuring all templates are designed correctly and guidelines are followed can be a tall order. Even if hours or days are spent on this task, it’s all worth nothing if other departments don’t follow the blueprint.

However, Taxi’s customizable email template system protected Scaled Agile’s brand from being the victim of design errors, messaging faux pas, and overall off-brand emails. The company’s marketing team updated over 100 emails with the easy-to-use clone and edit features, a process that would’ve otherwise taken them months to complete.

“It's so easy to customize emails using the parent version from a current or previous campaign and clone it to whatever customer specifications you need,” said Lauren. “It's helped our ABM strategy that, ‘Hey, we can send much more customized emails quickly. We don't have to wait.’ Design isn't making headers anymore. It's us just typing it in, which is so nice.”

This streamlined approach means employees, contractors, and other stakeholders can get as creative as possible without venturing outside established brand guidelines.

3. A/B testing and search functionality bring clarity to campaign configuration

Email marketing plays a major role in Scaled Agile’s winning communication strategy, largely because of the dozens of tests they’re running and learning from. Testing allows for tighter email version control, which ensures no rogue branding elements are sent to customers or prospects. Better testing has led to a simplified, efficient campaign rollout process for Scaled Agile.

Taxi’s testing and quality assurance (QA) features enable stakeholders to preview emails for desktop or mobile in real-time, even as others are making additional edits. These features equip Scaled Agile, a company that never had a formalized QA process, to run more than 55 tests in less than a year on elements like subject lines, images, audience segments, and button text.

“If I have a footer change I need to make in a 10-message series, I can instantly translate that across every email by editing the parent template,” added Eva. “It's beneficial for transactional emails and A/B testing for us now—way more than it used to be.”

With a catalog of all sent emails at their fingertips, Scaled Agile employees can leverage Taxi’s search function to access previous campaigns and use their sizable archive to inform future successes.