SendGrid was a well-established email API frequently used by businesses for transactional email use cases, attempting to break into the email marketing space with an email marketing campaign. After around two years of struggling to break into email marketing, marketing leaders were interested in a way to build more content marketing traffic to the site via organic search channels. Problem was, email marketing is an extremely difficult vertical for content marketing.

In an extensive keyword research process, I identified an opportunity for us to gain a foothold in email marketing by adding a new feature to the site: A free email marketing template gallery. We could create and crowdsource email template designs and make them available via the website.

The gallery itself would target the keyword "email templates," while specific templates and subcategory pages would target more detailed keywords "restaurant marketing templates" to create a content property that was essentially unlimited in terms of acquisition scope and capability, and we were able to do this without having to deal with the overhead and difficulty of traditional content marketing -- outlining, writing, editing and maintaining.

We launched with a small number of templates and continually added to it over the next nine months. The gallery is available here: https://sendgrid.com/free-templates/