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The Mighty increased web traffic driven from email by 41% using marketing automations

How The Mighty leveraged Cordial's unique data capabilities to send personalized content recommendations and increase community engagement.

Logo of the mighty

Arrow pointing up240%

increase in click-rate compared to the previous, non-personalized, email campaigns

Arrow pointing up28%

increase in monthly retention

65%

of email-attributed website traffic is driven by three recommendation automations

Company

The Mighty is the world’s largest digital health community.

themighty.com
Industry
Key Channels Used
Email Mobile App Open Channel

The challenge

The Mighty is an online community dedicated to providing support and information for those living with health challenges and disabilities. Their community helps people connect with others who are living through a similar experience and provides them with a judgment-free space to share their stories. The Mighty’s community consists of over 3.5 million members and provides support for a multitude of topics spanning mental health, chronic illness, rare disease, and disabilities. 

In 2017, The Mighty began looking for ways to form deeper connections with their members. They wanted to communicate with their members in a dignified manner, being respectful of the vulnerability their members were showing throughout their community. Their team quickly realized that the legacy marketing cloud they were working with had limitations in how they could use and activate their data to communicate on a more personal level. That meant they needed a technology provider that could personalize messages on more than just a few standard data points.

When they found Cordial, The Mighty not only felt connected to our mission to help brands communicate in more emotionally intelligent ways, but they were equally  inspired by the possibilities our technology could bring them. They knew they had found a platform and a partner who could help them communicate more effectively and bring the community engagement they were dreaming of to life.

The solution

Cordial works closely with The Mighty’s Community Team, which is dedicated to ensuring their members are having a positive experience. The Community Team is constantly interacting with members, helping them find resources, providing emotional support, or connecting them with other members. One of the many tasks the Community Team is responsible for is helping to identify members’ posts that could benefit from more visibility and engagement. As their community grew, this task became extremely manual and time consuming. Working with Cordial, they saw an opportunity to leverage Cordial’s advanced data and messaging capabilities to automate this process:

  • Create an API feed that pushes all member post information such as the title, username, content, created date, topic, number of comments, and number of “hearts” to a contact-enabled supplement in Cordial.
  • Run a data job that calculates which post has the lowest engagement (number of hearts and comments)
  • Identify contacts who are currently following the topic of that low-engagement post
  • Write those contacts and the post information to a new supplement
  • Use SMARTY to reference the newly created supplement within an automated messaging template, dynamically populate the post details within the message, and send to members who follow that topic
The mighty email example
Supplements are custom data collections within Cordial that allow you to store data points that fall outside of the standard data collections (e.g, contact attributes, lists, and orders). You can use supplements to store complex details about individual customers as well as business data that can be associated with a contact.
Cordial’s Architect solution allows marketers to create personalized marketing messages in more powerful ways by automating data imports, improving data quality by transforming it for marketing activation, using machine learning to automate messaging optimization, and by building advanced predictive models for customer engagement.

In addition to nurturing member posts, The Mighty also publishes helpful articles and stories. Their community contains over 60,000 articles spanning across a multitude of topics. The Community Team was trying their best to keep up with all of the published content so they could recommend relevant articles to members. After seeing the power of Cordial’s data capabilities, they felt confident they could automate this process as well. The Mighty began building their solution in Cordial to automatically recommend daily articles for each topic a member followed:

  • Create an API feed that pushes all article information such as the title, topic, content, URL, and published date to a Cordial supplement. 
  • Run a data job to identify all topics that have newly published articles and users who follow each of those topics.
  • Write the article information for each topic and the associated contacts’ details to a new contact-enabled supplement.
  • Use SMARTY to reference the newly created supplement within an automated messaging template, dynamically populate the topics and articles within the message, and send to the members identified.
The mighty email example

After seeing the success and time-savings from these first two automations, the team was motivated to build another program  that would highlight the highest performing member post at the end of each day. Leveraging the framework of the solution they had already built to identify the lowest performing post, The Mighty built the following automation:

  • Create an API feed that pushes all member post information such as the title, username, content, created date, topic, number of comments, and number of “hearts” to a contact-enabled supplement in Cordial.
  • Run a data job that calculates which post has the highest engagement (number of hearts and comments)
  • Write the post details to a new supplement
  • Use SMARTY to reference the newly created supplement within an automated messaging template. First filter the post information to ensure no triggering language is being used, then dynamically populate the post details within the message. 
  • Send the message at the end of each day to all active members
The mighty email example
Collage of individuals wearing mighty tshirts
"Cordial, in a sense, has grown into one of the most valuable members of our community and our team. Its ability to help us scale connections and resources to anyone who joins The Mighty is invaluable, and its impact on our members and retention is palpable. It lets us connect to our community in ways most other health platforms don't. This is part of why The Mighty's members see The Mighty as their second-most trusted source for their health conditions, only behind their primary care provider."

Anthony Easton, Director of Growth at The Mighty

The result

The Mighty saw an immediate improvement in website traffic and email engagement after launching these automations. Their email-attributed website traffic increased by 41%, with 65% of that traffic coming directly from these three automations. Their email click-rates increased by 240% even though they’re sending significantly more email, proving that personalization is key to their success with this channel. 

Additionally they’ve seen a 28% increase in their monthly retention rate. Likely due to their member’s improved ability to connect with other members and find helpful, relevant resources within their community.

In fact, these automations have performed so well that The Mighty is currently expanding this messaging to a new channel — mobile app. They’ve recreated these campaigns into push notifications which will allow them to connect with their members in near real-time and continue their efforts to develop even deeper relationships.