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Best Email Newsletter for Marketing Purposes:
Gold Consumer
Olympus Designed to Do More
Brand/Client Side Team:
James Harper, Christine Harrington, Ryan Smedstad, Keith Swiderski, Chad Smith, Scott Hennessy, James Wechsler, Dennis Sheridan
MarketingSherpa Summary - Why They Won:
This winning newsletter was specifically designed to benefit from three big trends in
online marketing. First, it's designed, with carefully chunked content-sections, for
viewing easily and comfortably in the preview panel. Second, 50% of the content is
reader generated. Third, reader clicks land on Web pages that are designed with the
newsletter in mind. These pages are clean, easy to navigate and feature large headlines
precisely matching the newsletter item the reader clicked on to get there. All of which
explains why results are outstanding.
From Their Nomination Form:
Olympus America created the 'Designed to Do More' (DTDM) newsletter to be an
informative, interactive and customer-friendly opt-in publication for Olympus digital
camera owners. The DTDM newsletter's content includes a Tip of the Month, Featured
Reader Photos, a Quick Tip, reader submitted Q&As, as well as a poll. The DTDM
newsletter is sent to second-year camera owners -- it follows a 12-month triggered email
newsletter, which covers camera-specific tips and tricks -- and was created to expand on
the operational camera knowledge discussed in the first-year series. The DTDM
newsletter keeps the reader in mind: it provides real examples on how to get the most out
of digital photography.
Aside from creating reader interaction and providing helpful photography tips, we also
wanted to pull readers away from our first-year trigger-based newsletter, and transition
them into a more-traditional newsletter delivery schedule. This allowed us to theme our
newsletters so that they coincide with specific holidays and seasons. Olympus delivers
the DTDM newsletter -- about every six weeks -- to readers who have received the final
edition of the first-year newsletter series. To maximize delivery and open rates we used suppression lists. This
was done to prevent sending the newsletter to subscribers that didn't open the last seven
issues in the first-year series. We also tested various open days and times. I have included
the results from October/November 2006 and December 2006 issues as reported by
EmailLabs -- Olympus' ESP.
Our newsletter invites reader interaction. Three out of the six sections contain reader-
generated or reader-inspired content. We have the Featured Reader Photo, Ask Oly, and
Reader Poll sections. In addition, we include a link to a reader survey to generate specific
feedback about the newsletter. The newsletter's design is easy to scan - even in preview
windows. Each section was created to be smaller than the height of the average preview
window. The subject line is very similar to the one used in our previous 12-month series.
We intentionally did this because the readers were used to receiving email with this
subject line. We also read in a Marketing Sherpa post that "boring" subject lines can
produce better results. It is personalized based on the subscriber's camera model.
From issue to issue we believe it's important to strike a balance between presenting a
consistent brand identity and implementing fresh ideas. The DTDM newsletter presents
the same look and feel to readers in each issue; however, we've already begun
experimenting with new design and usability features in our 2007 issues. Some of these
new initiatives include: experimenting with an animated gif in the "Reader photos" area
to cycle through multiple photos, adding multiple questions to the Q&A feature, and
exploring the possibility of creating a reader poll that displays real-time results.
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