Northwest Lien is the premier construction lien and preliminary notice filing service on the West Coast, known for its regional expertise and excellent customer service. Contractors can register for a free account on the Northwest Lien website, then use it to purchase and file notices and liens to ensure they’re paid for work they completed on jobs.
4% avg. CTR
13 emails in automation
The Goals & Challenges
Northwest Lien offers online construction lien and notice filing via its website. Users must register for a free account to file any documents, and those who file many documents each year can sign up for a paid membership that includes freebies, discounts, and additional benefits.
This structure means that Northwest Lien has email addresses for two distinct audiences: 1) free account holders, and 2) paid members. For free account holders, the goals were to educate them on liens, which can be complex, and compel them to file additional documents or sign up for a paid membership. For paid members, the goals were to remind them of their membership benefits, offer help, and keep them engaged as customers.
Because Northwest Lien already had an extensive list of email addresses to contact, email marketing was the perfect way to accomplish these goals.
Our Email Marketing Solutions
With a deep understanding of Northwest Lien’s target audiences, we first ideated topics for each email, ensuring we offered useful information over promotion of services. We then defined a sequence and delivery cadence that was logical for email recipients.
Ideally, each email would bring an audience member one step closer to filing another document with Northwest Lien — by educating the audience on a lien topic, promoting a specific service or member benefit, or highlighting a customer success story.
The technical implementation of these automations was complex because Northwest Lien’s e-commerce functionality was built using primarily website forms. To ensure users who submitted forms were properly tagged and imported into Mailchimp audiences, and thus added to email automations, we set up an integration between Mailchimp and Gravity Forms, the WordPress form plugin used on the site.
In Mailchimp, we also had to build automations that included both one-off and annually recurring (reminder) emails to send to audiences.
The Northwest Lien team requested that emails not be too “design-y,” so they felt more conversational and less promotional. Given that, the content in the emails had to be particularly appealing to make up for a lack of visual assets.
For free account holders, the goal was to introduce Northwest Lien as a helpful resource, sharing tips, blog posts, and clear contact information. For paid members, who were already familiar with Northwest Lien, the focus was primarily on value-adds and reminders to use all the benefits of their membership.
The Results
Northwest Lien ended the project with a sustainable email automation that required very little maintenance, which was important to a small team already stretched thin. On top of that, the emails delivered real results: eye-catching subject lines and preview text drew in engaged users, ensuring Northwest Lien stayed top of mind for both its target audiences.
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