Email Marketing Programs

[ The situation ]

What I walked into

FCCU. The credit union's newsletter went out to 130,000+ subscribers but was underperforming, with a 5% open rate and 5.6% click-through. The content was generic and untargeted. A member with checking but no credit card got the same email as a member with a home loan. There was no segmentation, no behavioral logic, and no connection between what the credit union knew about a member and what it was sending them.

Generator Supercenter. The company had no follow-up system for unsold leads. When someone received a quote but didn't convert, that lead went cold. With generators starting around $15,000, every lost quote was real revenue walking out the door, and there was no automated way to stay in front of those prospects and bring them back.

[ What I did ]

How I approached it

FCCU — a segmented lifecycle program tied to real member data

I built the segmentation logic around what products a member already had and what they didn't. Checking and savings but no credit card meant a credit card offer; no auto loan meant auto loan content. To make that work, I partnered with IT to implement daily batch uploads from the core banking system into Documatix, a compliance-ready platform for financial institutions, so targeting reflected real member activity within 24 hours. Then I redesigned the newsletter and layered in automated lifecycle touches, anniversary, birthday, and product-specific campaigns, all inside the compliance layer that credit union communications require.

Generator Supercenter — an automated lead-recovery engine

No one was following up with unsold leads, so I designed an automated drip to nurture quoted-but-not-sold prospects back toward conversion. I developed the full messaging strategy across a sequence of touchpoints, each taking a different angle: social proof, seasonal urgency, promotional offers, peace of mind. I chose Mailchimp to execute it and built in echo-send logic, if a lead doesn't open the first version, they get a second with a different subject line, and the sequence only advances when they engage. Anyone who completes the full series has actively opened every touchpoint, which makes them a genuinely warm audience rather than just a name in a list.

Built the wider lifecycle architecture from scratch

Underneath the recovery drip, I built out the full GSC email architecture before the team scaled: roughly 20 sales-nurture emails, 10 service emails, and a post-purchase lifecycle program covering birthdays, holidays, referrals, and review requests. I rolled it across 30 markets with weekly sold and unsold list management, then transitioned day-to-day operation to the team. It was designed to run on a simple, repeatable process and not depend on me, and it still runs the way I designed it.

[ The results ]

What it produced

FCCU

Generator Supercenter

Both programs prove the same pattern: identify the gap, design the system, build it, prove it works, make it self-sustaining, and move to the next problem. The FCCU program kept running after I left, and the GSC lifecycle engine is still operating on weekly vendor uploads exactly as designed.