Skip to main content

Customer Journeys and Landing Pages Drive Engagement

Gear Patrol developed the Library of Pursuits to teach new skills through a series of automated emails.

Published: September 26, 2024  —  Media and Publishing  —  New York and Los Angeles, US  —  List Size: 600,000+

Intuit Mailchimp customer and award-winning lifestyle publication and content studio Gear Patrol is dedicated to reviewing and reporting on products like cars, watches, whiskey, tech, and more to help their customers make the best decisions on what to buy.

They recently assembled a team of experts, editors, and illustrators to develop the Library of Pursuits, a series of free, expert-led courses designed to help individuals learn new skills—available exclusively by email newsletter.

“We started at Gear Patrol with just one humble daily newsletter, an automated recap of the day. And now we have 4 editorial newsletters, 3 newsletter courses, and we're testing a new bi-weekly pilot column written by our founder and CEO,” Director of Growth Strategy & Development Caitlyn Shaw says. “Email is a cool opportunity to turn unknown visitors on the web into known loyal visitors over email with whom we can nourish long-term relationships.”

The overall purposes of their newsletters range from creating a sales funnel driving to print edition subscriptions, to simply creating content their audience will like. Engagement and audience growth is vital to the publication’s business model—Gear Patrol creates articles, reviews, and more to attract readers, which translates into more sponsor revenue.

The challenge: Building customer relationships

The team was looking for creative ways to build one-to-one relationships with their readers. So they looked at their cross-platform analytics, including in their newsletters, and found the areas where their readers showed the most interest, and developed educational content around them.

With courses like “How to Get Fit and Stay Fit,” “How to Become a Bourbon Nerd,” and “How to Optimize Your Home Office,” Gear Patrol aimed to collect contact information and increase audience engagement. 

The tools: Customer Journey Builder and Landing Pages

Gear Patrol has experimented with custom welcome journeys, brand drip campaigns, and specific newsletter campaigns to drive newsletter and print subscriptions. But the Library of Pursuits was the first time they tried sending exclusive educational content. They used Mailchimp’s Customer Journey automations to send 5 to 7 lessons over 2 weeks, keeping readers anticipating the next installment. 

One of the things Caitlyn likes best about Customer Journeys is the ability to visualize the big picture, and also click into each email to see how it’s performing, how many people still need to take the class, and if there’s anything they need to adjust for the next one.

Additionally, they used Mailchimp’s Landing Pages to create a dedicated signup form, making it easy for readers to enroll—and easier for Gear Patrol to seek and capture more information about their readers.

For all their newsletters, Caitlyn also uses Mailchimp’s AI-generated alt text for every image. Alt text describes the images so people with visual impairments who use screen readers can understand the information in the images. And not only that, it also makes images searchable in the inbox—especially important if you rely heavily on images in your emails.

The results: Deeper engagement and subscriber growth

  • 34%

    average email open rate

  • 87%

    average course completion rate

  • 94%

    highest course completion rate

The Library of Pursuits series attracted more email subscribers, and using the Customer Journey Builder since April of 2024 has proven to be an effective tool for garnering engagement with Gear Patrol. By sending the courses over a period of time, they built anticipation for them, helping them achieve an average open rate of 34%. The courses themselves reached an average completion rate of 87%, with the highest reaching up to 94%,* showing that guiding readers through strategic messaging can result in greater engagement.

In terms of the Customer Journey Builder, Caitlyn says [the engagement metrics are] “definitely a testament to how we approach content in terms of building trust and being transparent, and signal to us that this is a tool that we want to continue to invest in with more courses or other unique ways to reach people in a timed series—instead of just one email.”

Looking to personalize your marketing and boost engagement? Discover how Customer Journey Builder can help.

  1. As of July 29, 2024
  2. Gear Patrol is a 2024 Mailchimp Forward Awards winner.

Related Topics

Share This Article