I have been involved in EDM and newsletter campaigns throughout my professional career, starting in my first role as editor at Datamonitor, and launching a range of industry-wide newsletters at World Market Intelligence. My most recent email work has largely been at The Warren Centre, created in HTML/CSS, Campaign Monitor and MailChimp native formats. I have built campaign landing pages in multiple formats.
The Prototype
In 2017-18, I created The Warren Centre’s weekly Prototype newsletter format, as part of a decision to produce regular content updates to drive social views and to make our EDM offer more compelling and less transactional.
The Prototype featured the top 10 STEM and built environment stories of the week, as submitted and voted for by a panel of student and graduate student volunteers.
I wrote a summary article for each of the selected 10 news stories for publication on The Warren Centre’s website, to maximise social sharing and new published content, and then created a short, reading-optimised article summary which went in the weekly email newsletter to drive clickthroughs.
Each article was written in as a 300-word SEO-optimised piece with a large, compelling image to encourage social sharing and a hook to the newsletter subscription page to drive EDM signups.
As well as being used to drive EDM and social signups, the Prototype was also used as an advertising vehicle; I created compelling clickthrough adverts both for our own products/topics and for external sponsors.
Events promotions
I built and targeted multiple events promotions using The Warren Centre’s email contacts database, segmenting by topics of groups, by likely willingness to pay (student/early career/experienced professional/retiree status) and by geography.
Using Campaign Monitor and MailChimp, I built and tracked regular EDM campaigns targeting the database with personalised marketing tailored to appeal to the specific audience group.
I tracked analytics for these campaigns to determine clickthrough and conversion efficacy, subscription and unsubscription rates. I used systematic A/B testing to optimise subject lines and calls to action.
Fundraising and awareness building
A key part of the organisation’s revenue was dependent on regular fundraising activity.
This was partly driven by EDM based on direct calls to action, which generated good ROI but unsurprisingly limited conversion rates, and increasingly over time with EDM based on raising awareness and identifying new prospects to target for telesales or personalised marketing efforts.
I supported these efforts by creating promotional emails for report downloads, e-books and other exclusive content, which we were then able to use to track the customer’s interest and funnel them for retargeting.