Estonia’s e-Residency programme, the world’s first government-issued digital residency, offers global entrepreneurs remote access to Estonia, widely regarded as one of the world’s most digitally advanced countries.
For nearly three years, I worked as the social media and email marketing manager at e-Residency.
My role included developing content strategies (social media and email marketing), crafting English-language content for various platforms (including social media posts, webinar announcements, and email campaigns), generating creative concepts across different media, and overseeing both the conceptualization and execution of social media advertising campaigns managing external partners.
Advantage & Opportunity
Pioneer: E-Residency is the world’s first digital identity programme.
- The right fit: Our values align with those of digital entrepreneurs: sustainability and inclusivity.
Challenges
Product definition: Some entrepreneurs may confuse e-Residency with physical residency.
Taxation is an issue (where is it not?): E-residents often struggle to understand where and how to fulfill their tax obligations.
Banking hurdles: Estonian banks have tightened account opening requirements for foreigners due to security concerns.
Increasing competition: Other countries are developing their own e-residency programs.
Getting there – Approach
Paid ads: We ran our ads mainly in English. After the coronavirus period, we took a more localised approach and created some campaigns in our target market’s languages with relevant landing pages.
Organic social media: We developed one tactic for each challenge.
Our head of content wrote articles about the steps e-residents needed to take for tax and banking.
I posted them on our social media channels, and we broke this content down into pieces, recycling it regularly in different formats and posting it as digestible content.
Email marketing: For over two years, I was responsible for preparing the monthly newsletter and hitting the sacred ‘send’ button. There were over 90,000 subscribers.
I prepared different flows for blog subscribers, e-residents and e-residents without companies, based on the information we received from the Estonian authorities.
For webinars and events, I created one-off email campaigns or different flows.
Long story short:
Different entrepreneurs at different stages of the journey?
Participants sign up for different reasons and expectations?
So a different flow for each.
When marketing is just not marketing
The coronavirus also changed everything for e-Residency.
Although working remotely became even more of an option during and after the pandemic, there was a time when we stopped, took a step back as a team from all the ambitious goals and KPIs, and prioritised what would be valuable to our target audience right now.
We held a hackathon between e-residents and entrepreneurs to help fight COVID-19. I still have a smile on my face when I think about those days, and I have to admit that pride is in there too.
E-resident Alagan and his team won the hackathon and I am happy to share that he said, “He was moved by the email announcement. Guess who wrote it 🙂
Messaging & content in social & email
We focused on the benefits of the programme, including remote working, independence and the ease of doing business thanks to Estonia’s e-services. When it came to “serious business topics” such as tax and business banking, out-of-the-box approaches did not work. Our community asked for concise articles with simplified information.
But when it came to the concept of Estonia as a digital nation, there was room for experimentation. To get a different angle, I developed the concept of “things Estonians forgot”, which attracted attention and grew the community on social media.
Caption: This is one of the projects I enjoyed the most because 1. It was about beautiful Estonia and how digitally advanced it is 2. It was insightful.
Description: “Things Estonians forgot”, funny memes about Estonia
We celebrated the 6th anniversary of e-Residency with a fun video featuring e-residents speaking Estonian (which is no easy feat, to say the least).
By the way, how did you make it work in 2020 during the pandemic? This is how our e-resident community did:
Tools used: Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, Google Tag Manager, Hootsuite, MailChimp, Buzzsumo, Typeform
Results:
- 9% yearly growth despite the pandemic (2020-2021)
- 15% increase in the email subscribers (2019-2021)
- 40% increase in the number of LinkedIn followers (2019-2021)
- 20% increase in the number of IG followers (2019-2021)
- Fewer irrelevant questions on social media by clarifying what we do, reducing the workload on the customer support
Learnings:
- Experimentation wins in social. Our community loved fresh, creative content. But not when it came to “serious” topics like taxes and banking. Which brings us to the fact that it’s not as black and white as “Our B2B audience doesn’t like TikTokish content” or “Our end users like creative stuff all the time”. One criterion for differentiation can be “topics”.
- Fancy webinars? Don’t run similar ones every two weeks. Instead, add value, differentiate and definitely work with e-residents (your customers, partners – whatever) at the events and webinars.
- Multi-channel marketing is great. But it is even better to be able to track the number of registrations/subscribers/engagements and follow up to see if that particular activity moved the person to the next step in the customer journey.
- Strong collaboration with sales and, in this case, business development will help you win. No need to reinvent the wheel – align on goals, share updates and keep rocking.
The e-Residency marketing team is doing a great job and I believe more and more e-residents will join the digital nation in 2024 and beyond.