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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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Best Non-Email Opt-in Messaging:
Silver Consumer
myRCI - RSS/Desktop App


Brand/Client Side Team:
Brad Pennington

Vendors/Agencies
e-Dialog
Jennifer Renna, Jessica Noonan, Danielle Eberhart, Randy Marquis

MarketingSherpa Summary - Why They Won:
Any marketer working for a membership organization or rewards/points-based organization where customers need to access accounts fairly frequently should check this campaign to see if it might apply their needs. By being placed on the desktop, the application becomes a stand-out handy tool that users never have to log into. No wonder it's such a tremendous success.

From Their Nomination Form:
RCI's vacation exchange system requires frequent communication with its members to allow timeshare owners to trade their vacation week for another similar unit. RCI desired a new communication channel to provide its members with near real-time vacation inventory availability thus allowing them to more easily make decisions on what vacation to purchase, ultimately decreasing the expense to the call centers. RCI worked with e- Dialog to develop a stand-alone application to give members a tool that monitors timeshare availability and provides relevant, up-to-date vacationing and account information through the use of really simple syndication (RSS). Given that RSS adoption among Web users has been slow, especially with RCI's core audience of baby boomers, RCI and e-Dialog partnered with third-party RSS expert The Port to design an RCI- branded RSS application called "myRCI" that members would download to their desktops. To deploy myRCI, RCI needed to promote the application through its existing call center and e-mail marketing programs.

While call center representatives promoted the application via the phone, RCI and e- Dialog set up an email acquisition campaign to introduce all RCI members to the application and provide them with valuable information and the benefits that the tool has to offer. The email encouraged members to click through to an e-Dialog-hosted myRCI registration page, where they are asked for their member ID and ZIP Code. For this solution to be successful RCI needed to publish relevant information to its members. To do so, RCI used existing data (member account information), acquired new data (through the development of a preference center) and integrated third-party content such as weather reports and articles related to known customer preferences. Member account information is automatically published into a feature of myRCI called Account Alerts, informing customers of the status of their membership and of expiring points. When a member starts myRCI, e-Dialog sends the Account Alert RSS feeds to their application for viewing. Similarly, RCI feeds relevant vacation information and additional value added content to the myRCI application. Sorry, the judges promised this winner that we would keep their results private. However, be assured that we have seen all the data - and were thoroughly impressed!