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Have you ever heard the age-old classic story of a company that got its start from a back-of-the-napkin idea? Or about the start-ups that started in someone’s garage?
While all those stories are, of course, inspirational, a huge element that they leave out is that every business started because someone felt the project justified spending time and money on it.

That’s why some projects require you to write a business case. Whether you want to start a company, pitch a new product, or perhaps you just want your business to use a new project management tool. Either way, a project that requires time and resources will also require justifying those expenses in the form of a business case.
Below, let’s review what a business case is, plus an example and template to inspire your own business case.

In a business case, you might include the background on a project, expected benefits, costs, risks, and opportunities. This document will justify taking on a certain project. So, how do you develop a business case? Let’s dive in below.
Business Case Development
To develop a business case, you’ll need to write several key components, including a proposal, strategy, budget, SWOT analysis, and project plan. With these documents, you should be able to prove that the project you’re pitching is worth doing.
Let’s dive into the steps for how you’ll develop a business case below:
1. Research
Before you can write a business case, you need to do your research. First, you should have a goal in mind for your project, whether it’s to create a new product, help drive more traffic/leads, or improve user experience.
Write down your goal and then conduct research to prove that your project is the way to achieve your goal.
You can begin by researching what competitors are doing and look for gaps that your project solves.
Start to brainstorm what this project’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are. Additionally, you’ll want to learn about your market — whoever will be the consumer of the project, even if that’s your own team.
Finally, you should start to look into what a budget would look like for your proposed solution.
2. Focus on one component at a time.
A business case will usually include several documents. Focus on one at a time, while keeping your notes organized.
Start with your proposal, then move on to your SWOT analysis, the competitive analysis, the project plan, overall strategy, and then the budget. It can be easy to get lost in just one of these tasks, so focus on one thing at a time to complete the bigger picture business case.
3. Write an implementation plan.
Once you’ve gathered your research and you’re working through each component, it’s time to start thinking about implementation.
How will you implement your project? Once you’ve made the business case that your project should be done, stakeholders will wonder how you’ll execute it.
To do this, write an implementation plan that discusses how you’d complete the project and metrics that you’d track to measure success.
Once you’re done writing your business case, look at the whole document and ask yourself whether it’s comprehensive, measurable, and adaptable.
A business case doesn’t need to be an entire business plan for a new product. Sometimes it will be less formal due to the size of the project. Either way, you want to make a strong case for your project, so it should be easy to understand and implement.
Now, let’s look at an example of what a business case might look like.
Business Case Example
Now that you’ve seen what it takes to write a business case and what the process looks like, let’s look at an example for inspiration.
In the example below, the project is about getting a new phone system to help the sales staff. Because this is a fairly small project, the business case isn’t several pages long with exhaustive research.
However, it’s important to keep in mind that while your business case might look something like this for a small scale project, it might include several pages of information if you’re pitching something like a new product or a new UI to improve user experience.
The point in the business case is that it’s adaptable to be whatever you need. However, the components of the business case will be the same regardless of how long it is. Every business case should include why a project should be done, the benefits, costs, risks, and budget.

Image Source
Simple Business Case Template
Proposal

Project details
Strategic context
Vision, goals, objectives
Benefits

SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)
Competitive Analysis

See if competitors are doing the same thing
Look for gaps in their offerings, if applicable

Risk Analysis

What risks are involved?
Will these risks present opportunities?

Market Assessment

Do your consumers want this?
How will this help your stakeholders?

Budget

Economic analysis
ROI

Implementation/Project Plan

Roles/Team
Duties/Responsibilities
Stakeholders
Specs and Requirements
Timeline

If you have a new project idea for your company that requires a budget and resources, it might be a good idea to develop a business case to show your superiors that the project is worth taking on.

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We’ve partnered with Unsplash to bring millions of beautiful, and best of all, free stock images directly to our customers.
Our Free Image Gallery is available in our email builder, saving you the time and hassle it would normally take for you to find a stock photo site, search for the perfect image, download, and then upload that image back into our builder. Our customers have already saved over 300 hours by using our Free Image Gallery.
We want our customers to feel confident about every send, so we’ve asked Meghan Sokolnicki, Senior Email Designer & Developer at CM Group, to share her best advice when it comes to designing emails with images.
Ready to give it a try? Sign up today and start building your best email yet.
Here are her best email design tips.
What is the best way to use images in emails?
Bottom line, it’s best to use images to help support your message. Images can be a great and effective way to capture an audience’s attention and add some visual interest to your emails. 
While I’d encourage using images in emails, it is important to make sure that images do not contain the most important pieces of information. They should be used to help support your message, not be used as the only way to deliver the message. As a rule of thumb, deliver important information with live text and support that information with images.
Keep in mind that not everyone receiving the email will be able to view images. Many people use screen readers or voice commands to listen to emails. Even people who are reading the emails may have images turned off or have spotty wifi that delays the time it takes for the images to download. 
As email designers, it’s our job to make sure that everyone receiving the emails has a consistent experience no matter how they interact with them.
What is the wrong way to use images in emails?
Don’t send image-only emails! I see this all the time and do not recommend it. Sure, it may be beautiful artwork, but that doesn’t make it an effective email. 
When images contain all of the key information in a given campaign, this can greatly limit the amount of your audience who can interact with the email. Think about all that information getting squished down on a smaller screen! It can be so hard to digest, and who wants to have to zoom in to read the message? Not me.
A common mistake designers make is to take a print design and paste it into an email without making any adjustments for the new medium. Print and web are completely different experiences so it’s best to design with those differences in mind. 
For example, instead of copy/pasting, make sure you’re adapting your designs for email. Be thoughtful about how your audience will interact with an email. In email we have the opportunity to click around, scroll, and engage with the campaign on a variety of different devices. Let’s use that to our advantage!
Give it a test drive in our free email template builder. 
How do designers choose the right image for their email? 
Most importantly you want to make sure that the image fits with your content. Consumers are less and less interested in seeing generic stock photography that serves no purpose. Instead, think about how you can use images with specificity to emotionally connect readers with your brand.
Everyone’s needs are going to be a little different, so choosing the right image comes down to if that photo makes sense for your brand and makes sense for the content. 
As a tip, we as humans seem to love seeing other humans! So our designers see a lot of engagement come from images using pictures of faces. I also love using illustrations and icons as a way to break up space. Even a small clock next to content about an upcoming deadline can help draw attention.
If you’re sending a letter or a quick announcement, you might not need an image, but there are other ways of adding some visual interest to your email design. Instead, use bold headlines or add a background color to help emphasize text. While I encourage using images where possible, they may not always be needed and that’s okay too! 
How can an email marketer measure whether their email design was successful or not?
Success is measured differently for every marketer. Sometimes the purpose of an email is to drive clicks or promote sales and that could be “successful,” and other times an email is about sharing relevant content to help your audience stay engaged with the brand. 
In my opinion there’s not a blanket answer for how to tell whether an email design is successful, but every brand needs to define success for themselves and work their design around that. 
An overall successful design for email is one that feels effortless for the consumer. This means making sure the content is compelling and styled in a way that takes out the guesswork: Clear hierarchy marked with headlines, bold calls-to-action, and whitespace used throughout the design to help give your text and images some breathing room. 
Also never underestimate the power of relevant content paired with a compelling subject line.
What is your design pet peeve?
I have a few actually! As you can tell, one major pet peeve is copying and pasting a print design into email and not considering the mobile experience. (See answer #3!) Another pet peeve, when there is too much text included on images, it can be such an awful experience. Some text can be included on images—just not all of your text. It’s such a quick fix to include live text in emails!
Also, trying to cram too much information into one email. This can feel so overwhelming for your audience—give your content room to breathe!
Where do you look for email design inspiration?
I love looking at Really Good Emails and seeing what other email designers are coming up with. Email design can sometimes feel like a very limited medium, because we’re designing with so many factors in mind. I love seeing how other designers use those limitations and make it work for them! Litmus is always testing the limits of what’s possible in email, and I love receiving their emails. 
It’s not supported everywhere, but I still love seeing simple movement in emails. A well-designed .gif can brighten my day.
What are your final design tips?

Make sure you use a balance of images and live text in your campaigns. Images are great to include in emails, just make sure they support the message. We don’t want “seeing” the image to be the only way to absorb your content. 

Use alt text when you include images! This is text that helps describe the image or the image’s intent for those who cannot view the image. You can still include some text as images (for example: Sale Today! You’re a winner! Happy St. Patrick’s Day!, etc.) just make sure when you, do you include alt text, so anyone not seeing the image still gets the full experience.
Don’t shy away from .gifs! Movement can be really fun in email.

Wrap up
There you have it, some of our best design tips from one of our in-house email design pros. If you’re ready to put these design tips to the test, you can start building an email in our drag-and-drop email builder right away for free. Check it out.
If you’re already a Campaign Monitor customer, sign in and get started.
The post Designing Emails With Images: Advice From a Pro appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

Imagine being able to talk to thousands of potential and loyal customers one-on-one. That’s what email marketing does for you. It remains one of the most popular forms of marketing, thanks to its high ROI and incredible reach. Email marketing doesn’t work like magic, though. You need to have an actionable strategy, gather valuable insight,…
The post The Quickest Ways to Become an Email Marketing Fool appeared first on Benchmarkemail.

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Cure Brain Cancer is the leading organization for brain cancer research, advocacy and awareness in Australia with a mission to unite the community to increase brain cancer survival and quality of life. 
The patient-focused organization forges global collaborations, funds innovative research and brings world-class clinical trials to Australia to give children and adults with brain cancer access to new treatments faster. It relies heavily on email marketing to raise funds, engage its community, and promote its events. Switching to Campaign Monitor and completing a key integration with Salesforce has helped achieve many mission-critical goals for the nonprofit:

Raised $1.6 million (AUD) in a major campaign
Reduced amount of event registrants who didn’t fundraise by 90%
Near real-time engagement of subscribers

Finding the right match
One of Cure Brain Cancer’s greatest initiatives to grow awareness and raise funds for research is its annual Walk4BrainCancer event. What started as a single walk in 2003 in Sydney quickly expanded into a nationwide phenomenon with over 10,000 participants every year.

From recruiting registrants to encouraging participants to thanking fundraisers, email plays an essential part of every communication throughout the entire event cycle. Since making the switch to Campaign Monitor from Mailchimp, email has become easier and more effective when executing campaigns for this huge event.
When making the decision to switch email service providers, Cure Brain Cancer took several factors into account when ultimately choosing Campaign Monitor: 

Simple and easy ability to incorporate branding into emails
Best-in-class Salesforce integration
Non-profit friendly cost

Scalability and automation for their ever growing volume of emails and subscribers

“With the platform we were using before, everything was very manual,” said Alex Dobbing, Director of Fundraising and Development. “There was no sort of triggered automation to get our subscribers to keep engaging. We wanted to get more clever and make the most of building up our community.”
With a new more powerful tool, the nonprofit was able to increase the frequency, precision and relevance of its email campaigns for the Walk4BrainCancer event. A more intuitive interface made building emails faster than ever, like these high-performing case study emails:

And more automated customer journeys and triggered emails meant messaging was more personal and got sent right at the most opportune time to get subscribers to act. 
Email was a big contributor to helping the organization meet its fundraising goal for the most recent edition of Walk4BrainCancer, beating its goal of $1.5 million with $1.65 million raised!
“Email is by far the best channel for us. It’s such an easy way for us to reach our database and give them all of the needed information,” Dobbing said.
Virtual event, tangible success
Like many nonprofit organizations that rely heavily on big events to achieve their mission, Cure Brain Cancer had to adapt its strategy and get creative in the face of COVID-19.
Given the circumstances, a series of large gatherings was out of the question. Instead, it moved to a virtual event encouraging participants to walk at their own time and pace.

While this meant the organization no longer had to plan and orchestrate multiple large-scale events, it came with its own challenges. Cure Brain Cancer wanted to preserve that sense of excitement, energy and community that came with being together while walking for a cause.
“Because it is virtual, we are having to create the community slightly different,” said Dobbing. “We’re using the word ‘you’ a lot more; it’s definitely a case of wanting people to still feel included and like they’re part of something bigger. Which can be quite difficult to do when it’s a virtual campaign. We’re sending more emails because of that, but also we wanted to be a little bit cleverer with our journeys and the way we automate engagement.”
Thanks to this adaptation, the organization has converted a huge obstacle into a new opportunity. The communications team is now able to recruit and engage participants that otherwise would have been unable or unwilling to join a physical event.
“Obviously we’re never going to get to have a single physical event everyone can attend,  Australia is huge,” Dobbing explained. “Having a virtual aspect means no matter where they are, or if they’re not able to attend physical events in the future, we have that option for them. The community’s really rallied behind us, and we’ve raised almost $1.6 million in just a few months with the help of email!”
Email works better when technology plays nice
Campaign Monitor’s top-rated Salesforce email marketing integration streamlines email production for Cure Brain Cancer and makes every email more impactful.
The integration between these two powerful tools brings a suite of potent capabilities to Cure Brain Cancer, such as:

Easily build beautiful, branded email campaigns with Campaign Monitor’s drag-and-drop email builder

Send targeted email campaigns to their contacts in Salesforce
Measure how email campaigns drive donations and event signups
View email statistics directly within Salesforce
Map Campaign Monitor email fields with Salesforce
Automatically add subscribers

The integration makes creating emails and setting up campaigns faster and reduces the potential for human error. Because the platforms communicate and pass data back and forth seamlessly, it means the events and communications teams can stay focused on being creative and strategic.
Dobbing has the integration set to sync on an hourly basis, allowing the nonprofit to send timely, highly-personalized messages in near-real-time.
“Especially for our events, it means we can get our comms out in a very timely manner,” she said. “Before the integration, if someone signed up for an event, they might not get an email until the next day. That’s just not the kind of service that we want to provide—we want to say thank you for signing up, welcome, here’s what you need to do next immediately after they signup.”
An elevated journey leads to sky-high engagement rates
Empowered by the Salesforce integration, Cure Brain Cancer created a cross-channel participant journey for Walk4BrainCancer that generated astounding engagement rates.
The complex experience includes a multi-touch email series, invitations to join social media communities, fundraising reminders and tools, Zoom backgrounds, Facebook frames, fundraising incentives, and more.

The result: the number of inactive registrants plummeted. Nearly every person who signed up for the event raised some amount of money for the cause.
“Engagement has increased,” said Dobbing. “This year, less than 10 people signed up and didn’t raise anything out of 5000 registrants, normally it’s a couple hundred! And people raised more money per participant overall.”
Wrapping up
We’re honored to work with nonprofits championing important causes around the world like the Cure Brain Cancer Foundation. Learn more about their mission and the work they do on their site, and consider contributing, volunteering, or registering for an event.
Find other inspiring case studies in nonprofit email marketing here.
The post From In-person to Virtual Events: Cure Brain Cancer Pivots With Automation appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

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