The Golden Globes. The Grammy’s. The Oscars: The beginning of the year is a busy time for crowning the best of the best. In honour of this glamorous awards season, Digital Fire already chose the top magazine blogs in the country and now it’s the moment to recognize some worthy email campaigns, from the annual Marketing Sherpa’s Email Awards.
Email marketing isn’t just about a sales pitch. If you’re stuck for some interesting ideas, have a look at our two best email marketing campaigns of 2013, in the following categories:
- The winner
- Best promotional email
The winner for email marketing
The Marketing Sherpa had the difficult task of selecting the most unique and successful email marketing campaigns from a very competitive group of entrants. Trumping these is the grand prize winner, NFL.com.
Campaign objectives and results
The aim of this email campaign was to engage with fans by informing them about any NFL news or upcoming games. To achieve this, NFL’s most important step was to segment email lists by a fans preferred team and provide content specific to this list. Content included highly personalized articles, videos and upcoming game schedule.
What’s more, NFL went beyond targeted email marketing by recognizing a users need for the most recent information. A specialized integrated marketing company, e-Dialog, included a live countdown to each team’s game-score and inserted the most recent articles and video’s on the NFL site, on the day of the mail.
And, taking into consideration that half of NFL’s database is made up of mobile email users, a responsive design template was created for mobile-friendly viewing.
The 2012 newsletter received 121% more open rates and 26% more click through rates, in comparison to 2011. Mobile opens also went up by 9%, since 2011.
Best promotional email
Bessergehen won the gold medal in this category, by creating integrated campaign which connected recurring brand visuals across platforms with their animated Saint’s Day mail.
Campaign objectives and results
Bessergehen intended on increasing email performance and website traffic, as well as creating awareness of their new online blog. The brand also aimed to associate themselves with the concept of ‘quality’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘comfort.
Using animated, pink footprints which ‘walks’ the recipient along a path across all channels – starting with email. The campaign scores points for its multidimensional communication strategy which starts with an animated email which leads to the corporate site and social media pages.
The animated visual element within the email, coupled with integrated marketing efforts, was more effective than a regular, commercial email. Results showed:
- 133% conversation rate
- 43.49% open rate, of which, 9.78% were unique
- 19.7% unique clicks
- 9% click through rate
- 18% increase in web traffic
Email stays at the top of the digital marketing ROI ladder and, when used effectively, the results are astounding.
