Archive

Posts Tagged ‘email awards’

Mining Gold through Email Integration: 3 lessons from MarketingSherpa Email Awards 2013 winners

February 19th, 2013

On the first day of MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, I’ll be interviewing the Best-in-Show winner of MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Awards 2013, sponsored by Responsys. In this session, our winner, The National Football League, will discuss its fantastic NFL.com newsletter campaign.

However, there were several outstanding, winning campaigns from this year’s awards deserving of recognition as well.

Note: If you want to see the entire collection of winning entries, download the free Email Awards 2013 Special Report. There’s no squeeze page – just download, learn and share.

As the lead editor on this year’s Email Awards, I found it interesting that, of the myriad submissions we received, email integration played a part in many, if not all, of our winning campaigns.

In fact, as we’ll likely learn from our upcoming Summit sessions, one of the reasons email has been such a venerable channel throughout the years is because of the creative, strategic ways marketers have evolved the tactic to include elements of social media, PPC and website integration.

So, before we head west to the glitter of Las Vegas, let’s pull a few nuggets from these campaigns, seeing what you can learn from other Email Awards 2013 winners’ use of effective integration to find pure gold.

 

Lesson #1: Facebook contests don’t all have to look alike

Ritos GmbH, a consumer electronics company, submitted the OSRAM Innovation Store “Light ‘n’ Style” contest for Email Awards 2013. It was the one entrant in its category that bridged the gap between creativity and results, as it successfully tied together three key factors of an efficient, integrated email campaign:

  • Personalized emails as a support to the contest
  • A fan-gating tab on Facebook
  • A unique contest mechanism that created a viral response

The fan-gating tab on Facebook ensured only persons who were already fans of the OSRAM Innovation Store on Facebook could enter the contest. Contact with all participants was maintained throughout the contest through highly personalized emails.

The emails were personalized through use of the recipient’s name, an image of their favorite lighting product and the product’s current place in the real-time voting. The unusual contest mechanism also made the campaign go viral.

In the end, this creativity paid off handsomely, with the campaign achieving high rates of customer interaction, significantly increased social sharing and a tremendous boost (39%) in newsletter opt-ins – a “side effect” that wasn’t even a focus of the initial campaign.

  • 1,583 people participated in the contest, more than 10% of the existing newsletter mailing list.
  • 1,761,614 people were reached through Facebook ads and made aware of the new products – 119 times more than the size of the newsletter mailing list.
  • Facebook page increased its fan base by 18%.

Additionally, 582% more people posted on the Facebook page during the campaign run, while email open rates about the contest were between 55% and 70%.

Read more…

Make Your Email Awards Entry Count: 4 tips from a 2012 Best-in-Show winner

September 25th, 2012

Each year, the tactics, strategies and best practices in email marketing continue to evolve. And, in turn, the annual MarketingSherpa Email Awards showcase campaigns that – creatively and strategically – move beyond “batch-and-blast” to utilize fresh tactics and drive great results.

With the Email Awards 2013 (sponsored by Responsys) entry period about to wrap up (you have until this Monday, October 1, to get your entries in), we think it’s a perfect time to revisit one of last year’s “Best-in-Show” winning campaigns. The campaign can provide some ideas about what makes a winner to those last-minute entrants still sitting on the fence and wondering if they should give it a go.

(Of course, if you want to just skip to the head of the line and go right to the entry form, we won’t try to stop you. Just don’t forget to read the Terms and Conditions before you go.)

Okay, good. You’ve decided to stick around. Using a winning 2012 campaign as our launching point, let’s dive into the key elements of an Email Awards submission.

Traditionally, when organizations want to grow their email lists, they develop contests to draw attention to their email programs. 2012 “B2B Best-in-Show” winner Citrix Online took a different approach, choosing to instead focus on creating and sending valuable content, which was easily shareable for existing subscribers.

Here are some of the criteria Citrix demonstrated en route to a convincing win from within a very competitive category in 2012.

Read more…

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