How we improved Tandberg’s email campaign to take them from a 20% sign up rate to 200%

Email marketing can be a tricky medium to get right. Get it wrong and not only will your creative efforts (be it visual design or copywriting) have gone to waste, you risk alienating potential customers and becoming an unwelcome member of their ‘block’ list. Get it right, and the rewards compared to alternative direct-marketing methods can be better value per lead, and provide you with insightful data about prospective customers.

Tandberg – the video conferencing arm of Cisco – approached Makemedia after suffering mixed success with previous email marketing attempts, particularly when it came to making potential prospects aware of their training events. At short notice, we were tasked with taking a wealth of event information and condensing it into a single email. Déjà vu?

A familiar email marketing problem

Previous campaigns had failed. Whilst the content of the email was relevant to those interested in Cisco and it’s video conferencing offering, the missed opportunity to use modern development techniques to deliver an engaging experience coupled with an unsuitable and restrictive canvas meant a change of tact was needed. Our starting point? Simplification.

Using the right technology

HTML email isn’t suited to the type of experiences users expect online in 2011, so our approach was to simplify the email itself as much as possible, delivering the information previously squeezed into a non-flexible 600px (the accepted standard width for HTML email design) through a custom webpage. Here we would be able to create a more suitable experience utilising the browser – integrating event maps, video and positioning content using visual design techniques which would deliver content in manageable chunks.

Not only did the creation of a separate event webpage improve the experience of learning about the event, it was all possible within similar timescales to those spent painstakingly manipulating dated markup techniques to fit the various rendering engines of email clients. Email was not designed to deliver the webpage experience; your browser was.

Testing the target audience

User testing has finally become an expected part of successful website development over the last few years, and is certainly central to Makemedia’s processes. However, how often do you undertake the same level of testing for your online marketing? It is easy to take for granted that a large percentage of users will ignore or be uninterested in an email campaign, so very often this important step is overlooked.

To overcome this assumption, user testing was undertaken in partnership with Tandberg. One of the partners involved in the campaign – Global PA Network – provided Makemedia with a list of willing participants (within the target audience) from their large database of personal assistants. The campaign was sent to those happy to take part, and follow up calls to collect their feedback scheduled. This proved invaluable, allowing us to make tweaks to the copy and main calls to action that would help us attract the right level of user though to the event details page.

Saving resources

Not only were Tandberg wasting precious resources on failing email marketing techniques, they were also undertaking the mundane task of registering and collating signups by hand. “Interested in attending? Complete this Word document and email it back to us!” – there was clearly room for improvement.

Enter Eventbrite, the online event management application designed specifically for the job. Not only does Eventbrite make the process of event creation and signup super-simple, it is also free to use for non-chargeable events. The saving in admin resource coupled with an improved experience for attendees meant Eventbrite was an invaluable part of the campaign.

Success in numbers

The initial email-focused campaign using Tandberg’s own template resulted in just 4 signups for 20 available places on the training event.

Simplifying the email (content was reduced by 70%, and design simplified to decrease markup time), creating a more engaging landing page for event details, and integrating Eventbrite to make signup easy led to double the amount of available places being booked. We had allowed for this overflow – free events are renowned for high dropout – by doubling tickets from 20 to 40 places, and all 40 places were taken within a few hours of the campaign going live.

Not only were click-through rates and signup numbers for the event greatly increased, the prospects who attended were of the right target group.

With simplification, user testing, and taking advantage of the browser (rather than the email client) to deliver a marketing message, we were able to turn a failing email marketing strategy into an overwhelming success.