Center for Open Science Achieves 2.8x Above Average Click Rate With Automations

When you serve nearly 770,000 people working in every corner of the scientific community, a single email carries weight.

The Center for Open Science (COS) is on a mission to transform how research gets completed. The nonprofit serves a global community of scholars and research stakeholders across all disciplines, providing tools and solutions that make scientific work more open, accurate, and reproducible.

But their internal team wanted evidence that their marketing strategy supported the organization’s mission. Reaching a massive audience that ranges in expertise from early-career researchers to world-renowned experts provides a unique challenge in knowing what emails to send.

“Our audience is really broad,” says Theresa Vo, Growth and Product Marketing Manager at COS. “We’re trying to figure out what is the best content to provide per discipline of researchers.”

COS has a subscriber list of more than three-quarters of a million people managed by a marketing team of 3. They needed to move beyond simply sending emails and validate that they were reaching and engaging with the right researchers.

As Intuit Mailchimp customers for more than a decade, COS wanted to push their email strategy further to achieve ambitious growth goals in audience size without hurting engagement.

The challenge: Proving engagement to fuel mission-critical growth

COS runs 3 to 5 webinars about their tools and solutions, including the Open Science Framework, per month and needed to find a way to scale their communication without burning out their staff or sacrificing quality or engagement.

Before Theresa joined COS, the organization was creating emails manually for every event. Content would get lost between sends. Graphics changed. Tracking wasn’t consistent.

This ad hoc production made it nearly impossible to understand what was working and what wasn’t. Without that clarity, COS couldn’t prove to its executive board that their content was reaching the academic audience critical to their mission.

“When I first started, I did things manually, just to understand how it was being done,” Theresa says. “It did take some time away, and then I realized I don’t know why we’re doing it like this.”

The tools: Automation, segmentation, and A/B testing

Theresa started by building a foundation of automated email flows that could handle the team’s regular event communications. Now, instead of recreating email templates from scratch for each webinar or training session, the team uploads the attendance list and Mailchimp’s automations send the event communications.

“All we have to do is upload the list, and they’re sent out,” Theresa says. “We know the content is the same. Tracking is easy for us so we know how many people or how many clicks and visits to the landing pages because that UTM (tracking code) is evergreen.”

From there, COS used segmentation and tagging to understand their audience better. When someone engages with specific content or completes a survey, they’re automatically tagged for a specific email flow. Someone who attends a webinar, for example, gets different followup content than someone who’s just starting to explore open science concepts.

“We tag them specifically for certain things where we know this is a persona that fits this email journey workflow,” Theresa explains. “Or if they completed this, then they need to go to the other email journey because they completed a certain survey, so we consider them engaged.”

COS also relies heavily on A/B testing and regular reviews with their Mailchimp Customer Success Manager. They look at what worked and what didn’t, then use that data to shape their next move.

Mailchimp’s ease of use was crucial for a small team. Theresa had used Mailchimp before joining COS, but had spent a number of years away from the platform. Even with newer features such as AI tools and popup forms, she was able to get up to speed quickly.

“Mailchimp makes it easy for a person like me who’s a jack-of-all-trades to just come in and use the platform,” Theresa says. “There’s so much more I can do in Mailchimp now that I couldn’t do before. It’s easy for me to do things quickly.”

The results: Exceptional engagement and rapid growth

Implementing automation and strategic segmentation delivered immediate results. COS now saves between 7 and 10 hours each month on email creation alone.

With events happening almost weekly, those hours add up.

“That’s how much time we’re saving, but at the same time,” Theresa says, “if we need a refresh in content, we could easily refresh it by just plugging something new in versus having to recreate the template from scratch.”

These tools allow COS to maintain a 10.3% click rate, which is 2.8 times higher than the industry benchmark.

With their new strategy in place, COS achieved 39% year-over-year growth in subscribed contacts, expanding their reach while maintaining quality engagement. The growth helps demonstrate to the board that the organization is mobilizing the academic community around open science practices.

One targeted email survey highlighted how engaged their audience had become. COS sent a survey to people who had previously attended webinars asking about interest in individual versus group training and received 81 responses.

“With my previous experience sending out surveys, we will be lucky if we get 20 completed surveys,” Theresa says. “We didn’t have incentives for them other than potentially early access to the individual training.”

Those survey results were then presented to the COS executive board to help shape a new training service for researchers learning about open science.

The combination of time savings and engagement improved how COS operates. The marketing team can focus on strategy and content quality instead of manual production, and their regular check-ins help continually refine their approach.

COS is looking to expand their use of Mailchimp tools further. SMS and popup forms are on their roadmap as they work toward a goal of growing their audience by 40%.

“We want to reach more people and make them interested in lifecycle open science and either introduce them to what it is, or if they know about it, show them how to get started,” Theresa says. “Being able to grow means that we understand the market is growing, and that people are interested.”