Whether they are sending beautifully designed eNewsletters, or simple text based email outreach, these Astek clients have inspired us with email marketing campaigns that are well executed and “just right” for their organizations.

Case Study #1
Gotham Research: Simple and Sharable
Gotham Research Group approached Astek a few weeks ago to implement a fairly simple email campaign introducing Gotham’s services to a list of potential new clients. Gotham wanted to put their best foot forward to these new prospects, providing a PDF summarizing a recent research project. They wanted to deliver this in a simple, text-only email. Things about the email content that really impressed us:

• Emails began with a polite, yet personalized greeting – “Ms. Smith,“
• The voice of the email was right on – it struck an excellent balance between professional and personable, informative and concise. It was written as a personal message from the company’s President & CEO, Jeffrey Levine, Ph.D.

• In an almost textbook example of “viral” marketing, Gotham was giving prospective clients valuable content that was also an example of their work – in this case a 2-page summary of a research project performed by Gotham Research that was of relevance to their target market – and encouraging recipients to pass on the report summary to their colleagues.

When Gotham originally contacted us, they were considering sending this email using Outlook. As we’ve discussed in this blog previously, there are some major advantages to using an Email Service Provider like Emma to send out an email to a large list. Of these advantages, Gotham was most excited to learn about the ability to:

• Easily automate personalized greeting lines
• Protect their company’s office email from getting flagged as Spam
• Generate metrics showing delivery rates, open rates and click-through rates.
• Set hyperlink colors to match brand colors.

Even though Emma can handle complex HTML formated emails, Gotham decided to stick with the original ”letter” formating of the original email and not add any photos or graphics. Needing to add only a few subtle touches to already solid content, Gotham and Astek were able to get the email ready to send through Emma in a mater of hours.

Gotham began receiving inquire calls within hours of the emailing going out. The email got a 15% open rate and approximately 4% of the people who opened the email called to inquire about contracting the company. Gotham and Astek are continuing to execute similar email campaigns to new lists and strategizing ways to build on these successes.

A big thanks to Vin Design, Gotham’s brand consultant and a regular partner of Astek’s, for introducing us to this savvy company.

Case Study #2
Chicago Dancing Festival: Building the List
The Chicago Dancing Festival draws more than 10,000 attendees to world-class dance performances in downtown Chicago every August. But after three years of successful events, the organization had collected less than 300 email addresses. Every Spring, the event promotion efforts had to start from square one.

For the 2009 festival, CDF was ready to invest in technologies that would allow them to better build momentum from one year to the next. Astek worked with CDF and Vin Design to more aggressively gather opt-in email addresses through multiple tactics:

• From June through the end of the festival, a “cookie” was added to the homepage so that the first time someone visited the site, they were prompted to join the mailing list.
• A special welcome email was automatically sent to new sign-ups. The email outlined “all the festival details in one handy email.” Most importantly, the email was topped by a message encouraging recipients to forward the message.
  
• Buttons labelled “forward to a friend” and “signup for updates” were built into the sidebar of every email sent from CDF.
  

By the end of the three month push, CDF had grown their list to 10 times the original size. And because the list had been built so carefully, CDF enjoys incredibly high response rates: open rates averaging around 40% and click-through rates as high as 57%. (Open and Click-through rates for opt-in email lists are typically in the range if 10-25% and 10-15% respectively.) It was a highly successful campaign on all fronts.

This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter | Other ePiphany Articles

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Katie Hawkey Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Social Media, Web