Adam T. Sutton

Email Marketing: Merging German and American tactics

February 17th, 2011

We live in a global market. Gas prices in Indiana are affected by demand in China. Customer service calls from Florida are routed to India. And the New York Stock Exchange is merging with a company from Germany.

This is not the only piece of German news to cross my desk lately. We had a good group of German marketers at our Email Summit in Las Vegas. And several Germans won a MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Award this year.German newspaper

Globalization’s implications are huge and affect nearly everything. One great benefit, I’m starting to realize, is that marketers from across the globe can learn from each other (if only I could speak German!).

Check out some of these Email Marketing Awards winners from the land of lederhosen:

Bigger and better email lists

As the only entrant to win multiple awards this year, Germany-based promio.net had great insights to share. And they were not the only German winners.

Honorable Mention: Best email innovation
•    Agency: promio.net
•    Client: IDG Germany

Marketers at promio.net combined IDG’s separate subscription management pages into a single page, which increased subscriptions per user by 3%. The results show that making it easy for customers to unsubscribe does not always shrink lists — it just makes happier subscribers.

Honorable Mention: Best email integration
•    Agency: promio.net
•    Client: Nürburgring Automotive

Confronted with a list of email addresses that were gathered offline and had sat unused for months, the marketers at promio.net crafted a plan. They sent an opt-in newsletter to the old names, saw good results, and have since established a regular double-opt-in process for offline signups. Now addresses gathered offline are regularly added to Nürburgring Automotive’s database.

Silver: Best email list-growth campaign
•    Agency: rabbit eMarketing
•    Clients: Avis Autovermietung, ATOUT FRANCE

Marketers at Germany-based rabbit eMarketing designed a virtual road race from Germany to France where contestants had to recruit new players to get closer to the destination. The campaign’s viral design helped attract more contestants and boosted the clients’ lists. The campaign’s emails also had a clean look that caught the eyes of our judges (check out the awards for more details).

Insights are bilingual, I am not

As more great email marketing campaigns and examples come from across the pond, it’s important to remember that not only do we learn from our German friends, but they also learn from us.

MarketingSherpa’s 3rd Annual German Email Marketing Summit is almost one month away, and I expect a fantastic give-and-take between the audience and speakers. Although differences in language separate us (and isolate me quite dramatically), we all have the same goal: to get more subscribers and clicks for our programs.

Related resources

MarketingSherpa’s 3rd Annual German Email Marketing Summit 2011

MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Awards

Growing Email Lists with Social Media

Marketing Intuition (Contest): Which email is more engaging?

Photo by: Digital Sextant

Adam T. Sutton

About Adam T. Sutton

Adam T. Sutton, Senior Reporter, MarketingSherpa
Adam generates content for MarketingSherpa's Email and Inbound Marketing newsletters. His years of experience in interviewing marketers and conveying their insights has spanned topics such as search marketing, social media marketing, ecommerce, email and more. Adam previously powered the content behind MarketingSherpa's Search and Consumer-marketing newsletters and carries that experience into his new role. Today, in addition to writing articles, he contributes content to the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa blogs, as well as MECLABS webinars, workshops and summits.

Prior to joining MarketingSherpa, Adam was the Managing Editor at the Mequoda group. There he created content and promotions for the company's daily email newsletter and managed its schedule.

Categories: Email Marketing Tags: , ,



  1. February 17th, 2011 at 06:38 | #1

    Thanks for sharing – those are some very inspiring examples. Also looking forward to feedback from the German Email Marketing Summit, I’m sure it’s going to be fantastic.

  2. February 17th, 2011 at 10:06 | #2

    Hi Adam, thx for you kind remarks about promio.net – its an honor to get the recognition form the colleagues in the States. Feel free to link up with me in order to share more strategic insights – I believe both markets can share know how in order to make E-Mail marketing more profitable for customers in the US and Germany. Regards, Sebrus

  3. Adam Sutton
    February 17th, 2011 at 14:59 | #3

    Hi Sebrus — My Pleasure. Thank you for entering this year’s Awards.

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