We’ve been doing some great work with The Yard Effect (TYE), a creative agency that “helps brands navigate the ever-changing digital landscape.” Our Marketing Manager, Pauline Radford-Hayden, took some time to speak to Lou Stone, Head of Strategy, about what they do and how Mail Blaze has helped them improve their offer to their client base.

Hi Lou, thanks for taking the time to speak to Mail Blaze about your company, The Yard Effect, can you tell us a bit more about your company and what makes it so unique?

Lou: We’re effectively a full-service digital marketing & creative agency, firmly rooted in Lima Bean. And this makes us unique. There are thousands of agencies that can offer marketing, but we’re backed by 14 years of tech and web development, which simply means we can deliver on the entire user-journey. We’ve seen this over and over again: clients can trust that we take as much care growing their product (website/app/system) with TYE team than we did while building it with Lima Bean. Our clients like Outdoor Warehouse, PEP Africa and Spur Group have the benefit of their developers working side by side with their designers, strategists and content creators. That’s a crucial part of any product’s success.

On top of that, we pride ourselves in being agile and delivering fast turnaround times, eliminating the red tape that often defines the traditional agency model. The latter has been a game-changer with client expectations.

The global COVID pandemic has had some devastating effect on businesses across multiple industries, how have you and your team “weathered the storm”?

Lou: Like any new business, we had to adapt to the Covid norms of remote working and navigating very uncertain times with our clients. And in many ways we did. Our industry thrived because digital became the unicorn that had to make up offline losses (especially in retail). The success stories with food delivery apps, online education platforms and others that were able to get to market swiftly, are great. We had good gains and some losses, In quieter times we took some time to focus on our internal processes.

We’re proud to have you on board as a client, how has your email marketing changed since joining Mail Blaze?

Lou: Mail Blaze essentially gave us the opportunity to do 3 things we weren’t getting from other mail providers, at least not at this price: Cost-effective campaign pricing, especially now that budget cuts seems to be the norm. Local development and customer support. We are able to work with our own team when doing integrations for our clients, and they benefit off exceptional local support. Transactional emails firing off the same system. We now send both transactional and marketing emails off Mail Blaze.

How has Mail Blaze helped you achieve your business goals?

Lou: Mail Blaze has helped us manage and send client email marketing efficiently across many campaigns while saving some budget that we are able to allocate to other channels in our marketing funnel.

What benefits have you realized from using our platform? Time saved, cost reductions, increased return on investment, more profitable clients, easier to use, etc?)

Lou: Mail Blaze is a trusted local partner for us. It’s cost-effective, clients find it super easy to use and navigate. The fact that we can integrate our transactional sends too is a real win!

What would you say to someone else who is considering our service?

Lou: If you want to build & send solid email campaigns efficiently, chat to a local support team when you get stuck, and save marketing budget while doing it, go for Mail Blaze.

What has working with Mail Blaze meant for you personally?

Lou: It’s been great to see Mail Blaze grow over the past while. The product has evolved and offers such a solid service to its clients. I look forward to seeing what’s coming next!

Fuelling Success is a series of articles we'll be doing to highlight our client's success. If you'd like to be featured, please reach out to [email protected] to find out more.