There are two things that must be done before sending your end of year email: 1) making sure you can track all related metrics, and 2) testing and enablement.

Tracking Metrics

Here are the metrics you want to make sure you can track.

• Email metric tracking. This is standard in all email platforms, so nothing to check here.
• Product usage tracking. Many companies using a tool specifically for product analytics. Check with your product or engineering team that the features you are recommending are being tracked correctly.
• Connecting email activity 
to product usage. Some product analytics platforms will integrate with your email platform so that you can pull email, send and open data into the product analytics platform. This will make it even easier to track the impact of the email, since you’ll be able to create a funnel of both the email and product events. 
If this is not an option, you will manually have to pull the data from each platform and combine in a spreadsheet for analysis.
• Renewal and expansion tracking. While the renewal date may be far off, you’ll want to make sure that your CRM tracks which contacts are receiving this email. This can be done through activity records or as a campaign. That way, when you are trying to figure out if you should send another end of year email, you can see how many opportunities were influenced by it.

Test

Most people think when it comes to the testing change, you really can’t make changes. That’s not true - in fact, these might be some of your most critical changes.

There are two groups of people you should get feedback from:

• Customer success managers. Customer success managers. Not only do you want to run a technical email test with them, to make sure everything is coming through correctly, but you’ll also want to get feedback on the content.
• Trusted customers or customer advisory board. Hear directly from the people you want to engage, and ge their thoughts on the content you are planning to send.

Ideally you aren’t building this content in a vacuum and are looping these two groups in from the beginning. But if you haven’t, it’s never too late to get their feedback and incorporate it.

Enablement

Before you send the email, make sure that both your customer success and sales teams are prepared. This includes:

• Training them to be able to speak to the metrics
• Coordinating post-send outreach, including how to respond to customers replying to the email

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Get the playbook on creating an end of year email, with step-by-step breakdown.