The Catalyst Resource Group (CRG) Saves 5 Hrs/Month on Data Cleanup with SMS Strategy

Located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Catalyst Resource Group (CRG) is a faith-based ministry focused on the marketing of faith and family movies, media streaming, and driving its mission to provide inspirational resources to the community. The organization works to create connections between the marketplace and church audiences through live and on-demand streaming services and has been a part of 45 movies as of 2020.

Sakari met with Kyle Thompson, President, to discuss how CRG has experienced improved customer retention rates and transformed overall internal processes after integrating SMS messaging with their ActiveCampaign CRM.

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Industry

Faith-Based

Integration

Sakari + ActiveCampaign

Company

CRG connects resources, tools, and services—such as media streaming— for faith leaders that want to strengthen churches and create connection within their communities.

Obstacles

  • Manual data upkeep
  • Low engagement rates
  • High email bounces
  • Email going into SPAM
  • Lack of up-to-date contact info

Results

  • 5 hrs/month saved on data cleanup
  • Greater response rates
  • 10% increase in email open rates from SMS follow-ups
  • Higher customer retention and event attendance

The Challenge

Before the deployment of Sakari, CRG was communicating with contacts mainly through email campaigns to send organizational updates, event invitations, and more. While there was a limited amount of SMS outreach taking place, the process was only semi-automated, making it cumbersome to accurately keep up with any conversational updates.

Although dependent on email as an important communication channel, CRG experienced large discrepancies in contact data whenever customers updated their contact info (like an email address) but unbeknownst to CRG. This resulted in a consistently high number of email bounces when marketing campaigns were launched.

Turning into a large manual data cleanup nightmare for the marketing team, there were also numerous emails going into SPAM or simply not being opened. With low engagement rates and messy upkeep, CRG realized that solely email marketing was becoming more and more unreliable as their organization continued to grow.

ActiveCampaign-SMS-workflow

The Solution

In order to successfully streamline internal processes, CRG switched to ActiveCampaign as their main CRM. With a fresh start taking place, the organization also wanted to take advantage of an integrated two-way texting solution that would transform contact communication.

The marketing team found the Sakari platform in the ActiveCampaign app store and easily synced the two solutions in just a few minutes.

With the integration, CRG has built out various ActiveCampaign SMS automations, including one that sends out texts to contacts whose emails have bounced, asking them for updated information.

The Results

Using Sakari and ActiveCampaign, CRG now has the ability to successfully automate contact communication, decrease manual cleanup, and re-connect with contacts who weren’t engaging with emails.

"By topping off important email campaigns with texts, we have absolutely seen an increase in retention of contacts. We've also witnessed an extremely high open rate with SMS messages and now have a much leaner communication process thanks to the Sakari app integration."

Kyle_Thompson

Kyle Thompson

President, Catalyst Resource Group

Not only does CRG now receive faster responses via SMS, but is able to get an update from contacts who have changed email addresses—ultimately decreasing bounce rates within the CRM. Additionally, the faith-based organization has seen its email open rates improve by 10% which is attributed to sending text follow-ups to contacts that hadn’t engaged with previous emails.

Apart from improving external communication, SMS automation has been a time-saver for CRGs internal teams. The marketing team saves 4-5 hours a month on email bounce cleanups, allowing them to expand their productivity into other business areas.

Lastly, CRG has also experienced a better outcome in event attendance due to automated SMS event reminders that are built directly inside of ActiveCampaign.

“Using Sakari, we’re successfully re-engaging with old contacts who haven’t interacted with us in a while and in turn, seeing better retention rates, greater event attendance, and a happy marketing team.”

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