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Email Marketing Award Winners 2007

Email Marketing Award Winner
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Email Marketing Award Winner
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Email Marketing Award Winner
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Email Marketing Award Winner
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Email Marketing Award Winner
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Email Marketing Award Winner
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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.