A Phoenix-based client was ready to get serious about email marketing, and it was a great project to dig into. Starting from the ground up, the engagement covered everything from building and organizing their contact list to designing branded monthly campaigns with strong calls-to-action driving traffic back to their site. The result: open rates hovering around 50%, well above industry averages.
One thing that stood out early was an opportunity to segment their audience by market sector. Their contacts spanned both residential and commercial property, and sending everyone the same message wasn't going to cut it. A tagging system was built out to separate those audiences, allowing campaigns to reach the right people with the right content. Fewer irrelevant emails in the inbox, more meaningful engagement from the ones that landed.
Commercial - Does not include TBD/Potential were contacts that worked and commercial real estate companies.
Residential - Does not include TBD/Potential were contacts that worked at residential real estate companies or independent agents.
Potential were potential clients. There may have been some ongoing discussions about contracting Michael. We used this as an exclusion list so that the ongoing discussions didn't get muddled with new information.
TBD was sort of a catch all list for contacts the client was unsure about emailing.
We excluded both Potential and TBD from email sends, and excluded them both from the Commercial and Residential lists for reporting purposes.
This meant that recipients often received only emails with property types that were relevant to them. If a particular project warranted either due to size, scope of shoot, or other interesting feature, the client could decide to sent an email to both residential and commercial even if the property wasn't the primary interest type.
We needed to get the foundation right. That meant redesigning the email template to align with current brand standards, reconfiguring platform integrations to support automation triggers, and rebuilding the tagging logic so contacts could enter and exit workflows cleanly based on their own actions. Once the infrastructure was solid, the automations were rewritten, tested, and relaunched with fresh copy and a clear monitoring process in place.
The objective was a program that looked polished, ran reliably, and responded intelligently to how contacts actually behave.
A client who knows their craft deserves a marketing setup that matches it. From the first conversation, the goal was clear: build something clean, functional, and built to last. Getting into the details of contact organization, audience segmentation, and campaign design was genuinely exciting work, and seeing it come together for a client this passionate about their product made it even better. The kind of project that reminds you why thoughtful execution matters.
"We had a fantastic experience with Ryan. He helped us set up monthly marketing emails with Mailchimp - this included everything from organizing/tagging contacts to producing beautiful emails with CTA's and links to our website. The open rate is around 50%! He is very thorough and such a pleasure to work with. He has great ideas too. We hope to work with him again in the very near future." - Cristin Duerinckx INCKX Photography
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Ryan McGibben : Jun 29, 2026 4:21:22 PM
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