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Best Email Newsletter for Marketing Purposes:
Silver B-to-B
ISITE Insight
Brand/Client Side Team:
Jeff Cram, Patrick Craig, Mark Mellor, Paul Farning, Kevin Mackie, Lindsay Abbott, Paul Williams
MarketingSherpa Summary - Why They Won:
Do you love a dramatic before-and-after story as much as we do? If your newsletter's
response rates are flat (or declining), absolutely check out this redesign campaign for
inspiration. Best of all, the increased reader involvement is helping the firm land new
accounts in a tough market. "We have experienced an absolute surge in company
growth."
From Their Nomination Form:
ISITE Design is a 40-person full service interactive agency with offices in Portland
Oregon and Boston. For 10 years, the company had been publishing a semi-regular (the
goal was monthly, but we rarely kept to that schedule) e-mail communication of typical
agency fare (new clients, new employees, project launches). It's what 90% of our
competitors did, so we did, too. We have a house list that was built organically from 10
years of business. It consisted of clients, prospects, partners, friends, family and other
interested in keeping tabs on our company. Last summer, it became clear we needed to
revisit our e-mail marketing strategy. The copy and creative were flat, our list wasn't
growing and we were offering no real value to our readers who were growing weary of
the agency chest thumping bombarding their inbox.
There are numerous areas that make this campaign special. 1. Delivered Every Full
Moon: In looking at the ideal time to send the e-mail every month, we started out by
reviewing industry surveys on when the best time to send e-mails was. The reality was,
these are always changing, and really don't matter if you have good content. Rather than
playing catch-up and shifting our day and time every time a new survey came out, we
decided to make the delivery date a creative differentiator itself. The newsletter is
delivered "every full moon" following the lunar cycle. We are absolutely forced to hit our
schedule and send date. In the past, it may have slipped a day, or two or a week. Now, we
HAVE to hit our date. You can't change the lunar schedule (trust me, we've tried). 2.
Creative & Original Content: Too many newsletters simply repackage other people's
content. We wanted to commit to developing original content each month. We've had
extremely creative and relevant stories that includes topics such as "does you website
taste like chicken," a review of the online political sites called "does you website have a
hanging chad" and a multimedia podcast "State of the Internet address" delivered from
our President. 4. Staff Involvement: As a small interactive firm, it was critical that the
newsletter bring out the personality of the staff. One of the top sections every month is
called "Bodacious Bookmarks" where staff submits links to sites they love (on and off the
clock). We attribute the links to each staff member. Readers really enjoy this, and staff
gets satisfaction from contributing. 5. Soft selling our agency: One of the goals was to not
directly sell, but our "Agency Tidbits" section highlights interesting things we're doing
which creates interest in the company.
The results of the campaign have exceeded all expectations. Our open rates have
remained around industry standards of 20-25%, however since we re-launched this
newsletter six months ago, we have seen this start to climb as our content has gotten
better and more predictable. Our list size, also something that was actually DECLINING
for the past year before we reformatted is back on the rise. After 3-4 months of
publishing the newsletter, we're seeing month over month gains of 8-10% in the list size,
something we expect to really start to improve now that we have the history of quality
emails to start marketing it more aggressively on our site.
Unsubscribes have dropped to almost zero. We're only getting a handful of unsubscribes
per month now, which is a testament to the small list, AND the quality content. Before
we were losing more people than we were gaining. Multiple clickthroughs: Because the
content is so strong and there are multiple areas to click through, we're finding the
majority that click through are clicking through on 2-3 separate links. Click to Open
Rate: The click to open rate has been climbing as well, up from around 35% to over 50%
on many e-mails. Since we have launched the newsletter, we have experienced an
absolute surge in company growth, growing from around 28 employees to more than 40
and having more inbound leads and opportunities than we ever have. While this is
certainly not all due to the newsletter, we think that it has been a significant factor in
positioning us as a go-to interactive agency and top of mind.
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