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Email Marketing
Award Winners 2006
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Email Marketing Award Winner
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Best Automated Personalized Email (trigger driven):
Silver (tie)
Toshiba Invoice Sweeps


Brand/Client Side Team:
Nick Roberts, Paul Vollinweider, Terri Skitch

Vendors/Agencies
Direct Alliance Corp., Insight

MarketingSherpa Summary - Why They Won:
Wow --Toshiba has been running this 24-month automated series to new laptop buyers for the past five years. And month-after-month they've continually updated and tweaked it to pull up response rates measured in opens, clicks and yes, sales. The length of this campaign's lifetime, along with the marketing team's perseverance are to be heartily applauded.

From Their Nomination Form:
The creative sample has been staged to emulate the dynamic output from our email engine. The 'Buy Now' links have intentionally been left void of connectivity. Had this content been personalized, encoded and dynamically filled by our engine, these links would lead directly to a shopping cart at toshibadirect.com for immediate checkout. Dynamic merchandising and personalization being emulated in this content: Sales representative name, phone number, phone extension and email address. All mention of Notebook model and accessories merchandised for that notebook model (this template serves all Toshiba notebook models for this segment). The segments targeted are consumers and small to medium-size businesses that have purchased a Toshiba laptop over a rolling 24-month product lifecycle. The Toshiba dynamic invoice sweep campaign was designed to achieve five major goals: 1. Create a meaningful email dynamic merchandising engine to assist Toshiba customers with the selection and purchase of manufacturer guaranteed compatible upgrades and accessories. All upgrade and accessory products are not only guaranteed compatible with the customer's product they've been scored by popularity and applicable product lifecycle group. For example: All upgrades and accessories being purchased in the program are tracked against related specific notebook model purchases and ranked by number of invoices out. 2. Notify Toshiba customers about new notebook specific software and driver updates. Toshiba customers who have opted in for email get new software and driver updates delivered directly to their inboxes. The philosophy is that customers who keep their products up to date are more satisfied with their purchase over the lifecycle of that product creating greater overall lifetime customer values and brand loyalty. 3. Improve conversion and lifetime value of Toshiba customers by managing to both the product and customer lifecycles. 4. Improve customer reactivation metrics through analysis of product lifecycle data and next propensity to buy data. Create tangible value and strong customer relationships through email in an effort to influence the customer to make another purchase from the brand at product end of life. 5. Improve Toshiba notebook and Toshiba accessory sales. Predefined and tested product lifecycle zones. Timeframes for best propensity to buy have been tested and measured with the following components in mind (tested by day from invoice date): Total Revenue, Total Revenue Average Order Size, Total Revenue per Email, Total Number of Orders, Open Rates, Total Messages Clicked, Total Links Clicked. Products are analyzed, selected and dynamically inserted into the email template based on specific model lifecycle zone popularity, manufacture guaranteed compatibility and stock availability. (We've taken the guessing game out of upgrading or accessorizing Toshiba products). Expired offer refresh. Limited time offers create great call to action, but not everyone will receive their email in time. This functionality allows us to swap out the discontinued offer for a fresh offer, maximizing all the email in market. Driver and software updates allow the customer to remain free of vulnerabilities and optimize their purchase for the lifecycle of the product. Consistent evolution of email send timing and creative concepts. Control group testing, A/B and A/B/C splits allow us to optimize virtually every aspect of the campaign from top to bottom. Unique customer record level activity tracking. Unique messages opened & specific links clicked are tracked at the customer record level for the purpose of further segmentation of offers or methodologies in the future. This campaign also has the capability of generating an automated follow-up email based off of specific link clicked. ISP spam complaints and unsubscribes are next to nil with this campaign. This is a true testament to the perceived value of this campaign on behalf of the customer. For those few customers who choose not to unsubscribe but to flag messages as spam a proprietary process has been created that allows content piped back through ISP feedback loops to be analyzed and suppressed from any further mailings automatically. Last but not least, the constant improvement of results. As this campaign has become more and more targeted over the last 5 years, the results become even more compelling than we had ever originally conceived. The success of this campaign has been the catalyst of a significant shift in the number of standard broadcast campaigns being pushed from the program. All metrics have been calculated from total messages delivered in February 2006: 63.7% Open Rate; Open rate is calculated by dividing the number of total messages opened by the number of total messages delivered. 26.34% Messages Clicked; Messages clicked is calculated by dividing the number of messages with at least one click by the total number of messages delivered. 49.89% Links Clicked; Links clicked is calculated by dividing the total number of links clicked by the total number of messages delivered. 0% Unsubscribes; Unsubscribes are calculated by dividing the total number of unsubscribe requests by the total number of messages delivered. 0.0012% spam complaints; spam complaints are calculated by dividing the total number of complaints across all ISP feedback loops by the total number of emails delivered. $1.27 Revenue per Email; Revenue per email is calculated by dividing the total trackable revenue booked by the total number of messages delivered. Long Term Benefit Analysis: Control group testing has revealed a major delta between conversions of first-time buyers to second-time buyers when treated with electronic direct marketing. Through baseline report analysis we've been able to establish significant lift in the number of lifetime value customers treated with electronic direct marketing in the program. Automated event triggered marketing campaigns allow us to focus more attention on the acquisition of new customers and aggregating new results from more time intensive projects such as subscription content. We have coined the term 'Email Shelf Life' for customers that keep their email for the purpose of future reference (merchandised accessories like memory, batteries and hard drives are guaranteed compatible). Unique customer record data has been tied to a healthy residual revenue effect in the program up to 24 months after receipt of the email.

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