VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Case Study: Test a Subject Line in 2 Minutes & Get More Clicks

Recently we did a survey on the State of Small Business, you may have received it. Our Marketing team performed a subject line test in the email. One subject line was very generic and one was a bit more specific. We split our list in half using the list segmentation tool. It took just a few extra minutes but from what we learned it was worth it.

The first subject line: Take Our Survey and Tell Us What You Think

We received 181 more opens and 35 more clicks than the following more specific subject line: Take 5 Minutes - See How Your Business Stacks Up

In this specific case it seemed to be that we had more opens and clicks from the generic subject line and more people taking our survey. This illustrates why it's important to be testing subject lines to get more opens or content inside your email to be getting more clicks.

Case Study - VR Goes Viral Again With a Music Video...Check Out These Numbers

VerticalResponse released our latest music video Nuthin' But an AppThang starring our own Furious ALF and 2Fein. Videos like this and last year's AppEx Baby are not only fun to do, they really turn into a great viral marketing tool. (Viral, that's soooo 90s). These videos are specifically designed to get the attention of Salesforce employees, partners and customers about our email marketing solution a month before the big Dreamforce Tradeshow. Anyway, I've written about why we do these videos.

I decided to put a few more dollars into the video and this year we think it worked! The shoot took 4 hour  (we storyboarded our ideas) and the editing took a day. We worked with a great team called The Big Picture.

Here's where we stand:

August 20th - We launched it internally, had a preview party and then we "viraled" it into Salesforce, that is, sent email with the link. Crowd goes wild. In minutes (on a Friday afternoon no less) it was going through the company like wildfire and our own employees were sending it to their friends like crazy.

August 21st - Alf posts it on YouTube and we start getting 100+ views a day.

August 23rd - We post it in the VR Facebook Group (we don't actually know how many views we get because it's not hosted by YouTube but this is a must do.)

End of the first week: We had 1000 views.

August 28th - We post it in every group or event that is related to Salesforce on Facebook. We send it in a VerticalResponse email marketing campaign to a small subset of users, another 35 views, we include it in the email newsletter to everyone on the sidebar...another 120 views.

Viewing slows down around Labor Day but picks up again to 100 views a day.

By end of this past week we were at 2600 views on YouTube alone.

September 10 we sent out another newsletter and posted on Facebook to help us get to 10,000 views. By September 13 we're at close to 3,000. Probably won't get to 10k but it's sure picking up.

By September 16, we're at 3,025 views and loving it.

In all of the last year and a half our old video "AppEx Baby" got 4400 views, those also started to pick up as a result of these efforts and are now over 4700. All in all a success so far, and it's not over.  For not that much of a spend, we're getting our name and message out there. And no, it's not a million veiws but for a B2B video it's pretty darn good. Isn't word of mouth great? Email marketing and other forms of social media are really the culprit in this effort.

Our mission? To get to 10,000 views. Can you help? Watch the video and tell your friends!

Case Study: Results from an Email Webinar Invitation

A few weeks ago we did a webinar about our Salesforce.com integration. It went great. We use GoToWebinar, a pretty cool product. Check them out for yourself.  I asked Kara who ran the webinar here at VR about some of the metrics that surround using email marketing to drive people to register for and attend the webinar. Here's what we came up with.

We posted a link on our site, the VRU area of our site, a week or two before we did the webinar.
We got 208 clicks.

We then did a newsletter out to a targeted list of users in our database.
Total sent:      2700
Total opens:     766 (28%)
Total clicks:     152 (5.6% great click rate!)

Total clicks for the entire webinar "2-week campaign":     361 clicks
Total people who registered for the webinar:                   153 people (42%)
Total attendees the day of the webinar:                             75 (49%)

I think these are some really great numbers for us to start benchmarking our webinar series to test out new things.

Here are a few things I think would be really great to test going forward:

• Start mailing earlier, 2-4 weeks, and do a re-mail of the original campaign to the non-responders.
• Put the specific webinar link on the home page (right now we have a "general VRU" description.)

You might want to use our metrics and see how you compare. If you've got any ideas on how we might increase our rates, let us know!

Case Study: Response/RSVP Rates for an Event Invite

VerticalResponse hosted a free local event where the venue held 130 people (30 of whom were VR employees). Our mission? Fill the venue the best we could to be able to project for food and beverage bills (be on the lookout, VR may be coming to your area!). This was a challenge for Alf and Oranuj, the VR marketing team that had to fill the event.

FIRST MAILING

We targeted our list with the people most likely to come, those in a 25 mile radius. I used Melissa Data to get those zip codes then I sorted by zip code in Excel. I then picked out email addresses with the matching zip codes and Oranuj uploaded the list.

Sent: 219 people
Opens: 125 (nice rate!)
Clicks: 41
RSVPs: 26
RSVP rate: 11.8%

SECOND MAILING

We targeted the people most likely to come but half of those people never opened the email. The other half may have been on the fence. So we waited a week, and mailed all of those people again with a bold RSVP by: Date of 4 days from the mailing. We then widened the list a bit to include more zip codes.

Sent: 435 people
Opens: 200 (keeping it up there!)
Clicks: 82
RSVPs: 50
RSVP rate: 11.4%

THIRD MAILING

We still didn't have the number of people we wanted (knowing there will always be no-shows, additional show ups and stragglers at the last moment) so Oranuj did a third mailing. This one was a bit different because we re-mailed our customers with a message of urgency,  we told them we only had room for the first 150. We also widened out our target a bit more.

Sent: 518 people
Opens: 218
Clicks: 41
RSVPs: 54
RSVP rate: 10.4%

At this point we had 130 people RSVP'd to the event.

REMINDER MAILING

We then had to remind our guests of the party a few days before it happens. So Oranuj sent out a reminder on the Friday before the party with directions to remind everyone about the event on Monday.

THE EVENT

All in all a success!

Total RSVPs: 130
Total Show up: 71
Attendees brought guests: 20
Total attendees: 91
Projected: 100...

Close enough, great job to Alf and Oranuj!

LESSONS LEARNED

1. Business happens, people are busy - People probably RSVP'd "just in case" they could make it.
2. Our tests gave us a starting point - We now know for future events that a good rule of thumb for our customers is roughly 11% RSVP rate and 50% show up rate of the RSVPs. This way we have a starting point for future events.
3. Scaling up is important - As far as mailing list size with each mailing slowly widening the list gives us more control over the the number of attendees.
4. Urgency works - The urgency part of the message seemed to work, especially when we asked our attendees.

Do you have event invite stories you'd like to share? Chime in we'd love to hear them.

Case Study: Due Maternity

I don't know if any of you have seen our case study with Due Maternity. Shannon DiPadova and her husband Albert run a great business. Not only are they killing it in their retail locations, but they're doing some great things online too. We asked them a bunch of questions on how they're using email marketing and they were pretty forthright with their answers including response rates.

Even if you're not in retail, you might get a few great ideas.

If you're interested in doing a case study like this with us, email me.

If you've got any great stories of your own and just want to comment, everyone benefits!