EF English Live is the world leader in international education. They combine language training with cultural exchange, academic achievement and educational travel to deliver courses and programs that transform dreams into international opportunities. Since 1965, EF has helped millions of people see new places, experience new cultures, and learn new things about the world and about themselves.

“Taxi for Email is a very user friendly system that allows us to create all the different types of email we need, from one Email Design System”

Director, Global CRM at EF English Live

The Challenge

Being a global company that sends email in 30+ languages, EF had a strong focus on email to communicate with their customers, and drive business results. The international and multilingual elements of the company made their email campaign creation process challenging, as emails had to be written in specific languages for each demographic.

The team needed help to address the below challenges:

Multi-language sending - EF sent in emails in 30+ languages, meaning for every email campaign they needed to create 30 versions which was a manual and repetitive process. They had Middle Eastern audiences and therefore needed to have emails in a right to left (RTL) format as well as left to right (LTR). This caused complications because not every language will display the same e.g. numbers/symbols will format differently and they needed a platform which supported this.

Lengthy email build time - It took 4 days, on average to build an email campaign because there were multiple stakeholders involved in the email process. Any delays would mean the email campaign got pushed back further, and other teams would get held up.

Emails had to be created with HTML - The emails were created in EF’s ESP, which required a HTML build so emails were built from scratch every time. This was a lengthy process, and any mistakes in the code would cause big delays. In addition, the HTML needed to be QA’d from scratch too so there were lot’s of times that mistakes might not be spotted before an email went out.

A dispersed team - There were lot’s of people involved in email at EF and their ESP made it hard for them to create email at scale because it took 10 minutes to manually build an email in the ESP (adding the right modules from the template). The team was frustrated with the process because 80% of their time was spent building emails instead of focusing on content and strategy.

The Solution

Consolidated many capabilities in the Taxi for Email platform.

The EF team partnered closely with the Customer Success team and Email Design System teams at Taxi to create an efficient, scalable email process in Taxi. There were four main goals that EF wanted to meet, and each required design expertise and effective platform onboarding to achieve the results they wanted.

This included:

1) Integrating Taxi with their sending platform

EF English Live had previously been building their email campaigns in their ESP, which was an inefficient method that required some HTML knowledge, which not everyone on the team had. EF English Live needed a platform which took off the code reliance from their team and free’d up their team's time to focus on creating better email, and quicker. EF English Live wanted to continue sending from their ESP, so they needed a smooth integration setup if they were to move.

Taxi for Email provided EF English First with a product that would make email production significantly easier, and integrate with their ESP for easy exporting and sending. Taxi created integrations with Acoustic and Salesforce Marketing Cloud so that marketers could directly export their email campaigns to their connector, without logging in or downloading any HTML. This meant no code was touched during the build, so fewer mistakes were made along the way.

2) Building an on-brand Email Design System for the whole organization

EF English Live was using their ESP to build their emails in and every email required some HTML knowledge, which created delays if rendering was off or updates were needed. This wasn’t a scalable solution for them, especially as the email process was already complicated. Taxi helped EF English Live achieve the objective of using an Email Design System, with modular HTML building blocks, to build multiple email campaigns from one set of HTML. This would save time when building email campaigns across an average of thirty different segmented versions. These emails would then be translated into 15+ different languages, from French, German and Spanish to Mandarin, Thai and Japanese.

For EF English Live, they also needed a platform which supported their translators who sent in different language layouts. These different layouts can be coded into the Email Design System and within the editor, so marketers only need to “switch” to right to left format instead of coding a new version/having a different Email Design System to support this.

The biggest win for EF English Live is that they are able to create and send emails in any language without relying on code changes.

3) Better ways of collaborating with their team

It was important to EF English Live that their team were collaborating in the email production process. There was a team of 15+ translators needing access to the right projects and they wanted to start scaling out their email production. Using Taxi’s team and project structures they were able to set granular permissions which were unique for every team, so that if a translator logged into Taxi they would only see the projects they were working on. This meant that even if teams were working in different time zones there weren’t delays with access to the platform or finding the right campaign. Plus, the right to left language layouts were supported, making the translator's production process easier.

The Results

Before Bird, it used to take the EF English Live team four days to build an email campaign across 30 different variations. Now it takes them just four hours.

Integration with their ESP has been an efficient time-saver and made the entire email marketing process easier. They no longer have to create emails via the complicated process in their ESP; they can now be created in Taxi without any HTML knowledge.

Before Birf, EF English Live email marketing team would spend 80% of their time building emails. Now that they’re using Taxi, 80% of their time is spent on optimizing emails.