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Email Marketing Award Winners 2007

Email Marketing Award Winner
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Best (or Most Dramatic) Test You Learned From:
Silver B-to-B
ATIS Symmetricom TechThink Webinars


Brand/Client Side Team:
Jeanne Hopkins

Vendors/Agencies:
Overdrive
Ty Velde

MarketingSherpa Summary - Why They Won:
While more than 80% of technology marketers targeting large organizations offer webinars or webcasts, almost none of them conduct thorough tests of the email campaigns surrounding a webcast. And, that's a shame. Unless you test the email invitation and reminders, you'll never get as much return on investment for that webinar as you could have.

From Their Nomination Form:
The audience for this campaign was culled from the Symmetricom Telecom Solutions Division prospect database, ATIS (Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions) membership and readership, as well as a select opt-in subscription base from Telecommunications Magazine. As part of a three-part series, this campaign allowed us the flexibility and opportunity to experiment with subject line alternatives, timing of email blasts, text versus HTML delivery of content and most intriguing selection of speakers. Our careful scrutiny of success and failure factors along the way, resulted in an increase 20% open rate for follow-up emails to the first two Webinars to a 40% open rate for follow-up emails for the third Webinar. In addition, this campaign garnered the company more than 2,000 total registrations -- over half of them unique.

Some of the things we learned along the way included: capitalizing on third-party vendors as speakers, thereby giving the webinars less of a commercial and more of an educational appeal; using those well-known vendor speaker's company names in the subject line; sending eAlerts out well in advance, as well as the day before the event; using text-based, rather than HTML format (resulted in a dramatically superior open and clickthrough rate); promoting the content of the Webinars in the subject line and text - rather than highlighting the company sponsoring all three; sending "thank you for attending" as well as "sorry we missed you" immediately following the events, offering URL registration links to all three Webinars and encouraging recipients to forward to colleagues and utilizing all follow-up emails to registrants to promote other ATIS Webinar eAlert: Emails Sent, 40,146, (100%); Emails Bounced, 6,628, (16.5%); Emails Successfully Delivered, 33,518, (83.5%); Total Emails Opened, 5,069, (15.1%); Total Clickthroughs, 630, (12.4%); Total Registrations, 200,(31.7%). ATIS Webinar #2 eAlert: Emails Sent, 30,680, (100%); Emails Bounced, 216,(0.7%); Emails Successfully Delivered, 30,464,(99.3%); Total Emails Opened, 5,871,(19.3%); Total Clickthroughs, 509, (8.7%); Total Registrations, 224, (44.0%). ATIS Webinar #3 eAlert: Emails Sent, 28,668, (100%): Emails Bounced, 824, (2.9%); Emails Successfully Delivered, 27,844, (97.1%); Total Emails Opened, 4,747, (17.0%); Total Clickthroughs, 632, (13.3%); Total Registrations, 324, (51.3%).