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Best Email Newsletter for Marketing Purposes:
Gold B-to-B
Ariad Marketing Sense
Brand/Client Side Team:
Mark Michaud, Lee Fay, Manny Da Silva
MarketingSherpa Summary - Why They Won:
This outstanding email newsletter for Canadian professional financial advisors had
outstanding sustained open and click metrics. But, what made it the Gold winner was the
creative team's decision to focus on non-article content. Most business executives don't
need (or desire) more articles to read in their busy days. So, what can you put in your
newsletter to please them that's not an article? Find out ...
From Their Nomination Form:
Marketing Sense is a bimonthly email newsletter program that provides financial advisors
with value-added marketing communication ideas to help them build their business.
Ariad sells personalized, financial planning newsletters to financial advisors, which they,
in turn, distribute to their clients. Ariad distributes the Marketing Sense newsletter to
these financial advisors (their customers) in order to build loyalty and customer retention
by educating them on marketing tactics and techniques. Customer research showed a
financial advisor would remain committed to using a newsletter program if they had
advice, tactics and research that supported this kind of marketing. The research also
showed that Ariad had a high degree of credibility amongst advisors as a provider of this
kind of information and expertise. The primary target audience for Marketing Sense is
current and occasional users of an Ariad client newsletter or client e-newsletter service.
The secondary audience is "pure prospects" - advisors who have never used an Ariad
service. Ariad has grown this list through direct mailings and opt-in opportunities on the
Ariad Web site, through trade show campaigns and other marketing initiatives.
The e-newsletter is produced six times per year. It is deployed during the period when
Advisors are making their order/purchase decisions for their client newsletters. As part of
the sales cycle, advisors receive an e-preview of the newsletter that they can order for
distribution to their clients. The Marketing Sense newsletter arrives in their inbox two
weeks after the e-preview, and is scheduled so advisors can immediately take advantage
of the e-newsletter's tips and tactics for getting maximum benefit from their marketing
communications activities with their clients. It is also deployed at a time when call
volumes into the sales and service centre are traditionally lower, generating more
sustained customer interest during the whole sales cycle.
While it helps to generate sales and strengthen Ariad's client retention, it also provides a
high-value service to its own financial advisor customers by helping them to generate
sales and strengthen relationships with their own clients. Average email metrics (7 issues:
January 2006-January 2007 inclusive). Total open rates - 165%; Unique open rates -
54%. Total clickthrough rates - 43%; Unique clickthrough rates - 36%. Audience
engagement: Unsubscribe rate - 0.03%
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