How an Ugly E-mail Campaign Got Us a 58% Open Rate and a 48% Landing Page Conversion Rate
A timely and useful post-trade show campaign provided plenty of qualified leads for Yotpo’s Sales team to work with
“I just love getting those post-trade show e-mails saying ‘Thanks for stopping by our booth, would you like to buy one of our products?’”
Said no one, ever.
Post-show e-mails are usually untimely, because they are drafted, designed, and sent well after the show visitors have forgotten you were one of the 53 booths they visited at the show.
The e-mails are often sales-y and crude, assuming that just because someone let you scan their badge at a show, no doubt in return for your swag, they are now willing to fork over their money to buy your product.
One of the biggest challenges of a Sales team after a major trade show is sifting through the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of leads collected at the show and prioritizing them for follow-up calls.
Could a well-planned, post-show e-mail campaign do that for us?
We decided to find out.
What Happens in Vegas…
Last week, Yotpo exhibited at the Magento Imagine show in Las Vegas, where we managed to scan several hundred leads (the highest number of leads scanned at any booth of our size, according to the lead scanner company). I’ll probably write a seperate post on how we did that, but the main point I want to stress here is that we intentionally went for quantity over quality, scanning like crazy, assuming we’ll do the qualification and sales chit-chat by e-mail and phone, once we got back to the office.
So a couple weeks before heading out to Vegas, we put together this post-show follow-up strategy:
- Get the post-show e-mail out during the early morning hours of the first business day after the show, before the other exhibitors start blasting their lists;
- Remind the recipients about the giveaway we gave them at the show, to create a sense of reciprocation, which would urge them into giving us something in return;
- Offer recipients a useful, relevant, and interesting piece of content, which would be immediately applicable;
- In return for downloading the content asset, ask recipients three qualifying questions, to help us prioritize our Sales team’s follow-up.
We decided to keep it light and humorous, opting for a personalized, no-frills e-mail, which would look like a human being wrote it, as opposed to an obviously automated e-mail.
All that was left was to put the puzzle pieces together.
The Fabulous Five
We knew our e-mail campaign included five elements that were critical to its success — or failure:
- Content asset
- Subject line
- E-mail copy
- Landing page copy & design
- Form button caption
Here’s a dissection of each of these elements — what we did, why we did it, and what the result was.
Content Asset
All the leads we met at the show were either store owners on the Magento platform or systems integrators for Magento stores. We figured they’d probably be interested in information about getting more value out of their — or their clients’ — Magento store. So we put together a 2-page cheat sheet titled Seven Cheats to Give Your Magento Store a Leg Up on the Competition.
Creating the content asset took a couple hours of research, writing, and design, essentially collating useful tips for Magento owners from a variety of web sources and rewriting them for brevity and consistency.
We also added a subtle call to action at the bottom of each page, inviting readers to install the Yotpo widget on their Magento store. But other than this, the piece has very little to do with Yotpo, making it useful in an objective — not a sales-y — way.
Subject Line
We knew the e-mail subject line would be the critical factor determining whether our e-mail gets opened or not.
We wanted it to exploit the Magento Imagine conference’s recency while clearly stating the value of opening the e-mail. In this case, we were offering the recipient a gift. We also knew, from experience, that formatting numbers as digits (e.g., 7) usually works better than spelling out the number (e.g., seven). The last thing we wanted to do was shove Yotpo’s name in the recipient’s face, which would make this look like a sales-y e-mail.
This is the subject line we used:
[Your Imagine Gift] 7 Cheats for Your Magento Store
Result:
58% Open Rate
E-mail Copy
The only goal of our e-mail copy was to get the recipient to click through to the landing page. To accomplish this, we wanted the copy to be personalized, reminding the recipient how we got his contact details, and clearly state the value of why he should click through to the landing page. To add in a little extra fun, we included a goofy photo of our team at last week’s show and invited the recipient to send us a photo of his kids wearing the t-shirts we gave away at the booth. To make it less obvious that this was an automated e-mail, we reduced the font size of the unsubscribe link and increased its brightness — but not to the point that would render it unusable. We used Campaign Monitor to send out the e-mails.
This is the final e-mail that went out:
Results:
21% Click-Through Rate (of those it was sent to)
36% Click-Through Rate (of those who opened it)
Landing Page Copy & Design
In the past, I've used dedicated tools like Marketo, Joomla, and WordPress for designing landing pages with a form on them. In this case, we didn't have a dedicated system in place and needed to get a quick & dirty landing page up and running. We ended up using Wufoo, which is a very basic form builder, but proved to be enough to do the trick. It took us about 20 minutes from sign-up to launching our very basic landing page.
We wanted the landing page copy to stress the value of the content asset, making the visitor’s decision to surrender the qualifying information we were asking for a no-brainer.
We used the smallest number of critical qualifying questions we needed — three, and had the e-mail address and store domain fields auto-populate for each individual e-mail recipient. Had we had more time and a more elaborate tool for designing the landing page, we surely would have added a thumbnail image of the content asset, a short company boilerplate, some customer logos for social proof, or maybe even a quote from an imaginary reader of the content asset, attesting to how useful it was.
For the blinding image of our landing page and its results, read on.
Form Button Caption
When a form button asks me to Submit, I feel I’m either filing my tax forms or visiting an S&M club. Not a great start to my relationship with the vendor.
The form button caption has two roles:
- Tell me what will happen when I click it
- Tell me what’s in it for me
Depending on what you’re offering, a good form button could take on one of these captions:
- Watch Now (suitable for a webinar or video)
- Get Instant Access (good for almost any type of content)
- Sign Me Up (for a free trial or license)
You get the picture. Whatever you do, just don’t ask me to Submit.
You may want to wear your sunglasses now.
This is the landing page and form button we went live with:
Result:
48% Conversion Rate (of those who arrived on the page)
What Happened Next
We sent out the campaign at 7am EST on the first business day after the show, to make sure everyone in the U.S., where most of our leads are based, saw this first thing as they stepped into their office.
24 hours later we uploaded the qualifying information we got from the campaign respondents into our CRM system, gave our Sales team a heads up, and they started pounding the phones, contacting the most qualified leads. That same evening we recorded our first post-show sign-ups for both our free and paid accounts.
Oh, and we also got some adorable shots of our customers’ kids and pets wearing our giveaway T-shirts, which we intend to use in an upcoming blog post.
How cute are these? :-)
