A Truly Inviting E-Campaign

The CMO Council used the power of the spoken word within an e-mail campaign to filled seats at its recent Global Summit Program.

Yes, that word was "spoken". The Council's sales/reminder effort brought four weekly member communications into its members' e-mailboxes. Each of the messages featured a video clip of a prominent industry figure inviting the recipient to the Global Summit.

The campaign, which led up to the October Global Summit, marked a break from the Council's text-reliant messages. The CMO Council had recognized the need to shake up member communications based on response trends to previous messages: Click-through rates had dropped from around 80%-85% in recent years to 55%-60% starting in early 2006.

Part of this was due to over-solicitation: No matter what the CMO Council was offering — a free Webinar or a conference that cost $1295 – its entire member file (roughly 2700 members worldwide) would receive the blast.

"It was hard for our members to prioritize the messages," said Aaron Ware, director of GlobalFluency (the CMO Council's operational arm). "Attending a paid seminar and viewing a free Webinar are very different activities" and they require a different level of engagement to close the sale. By using the flashier live-action solicitations for its conference, the CMO Council was able to generate a perception of higher value.

For the Global Summit effort, the e-mails were simplicity themselves: A horizontal banner offered a chance for recipients to click straight through to the CMO Summit' site. But the focus of the e-mail was in getting recipients to click a link and watch the message. Targets were invited by first name to do so.

Clicking the link opened the e-mails to reveal an On24 media player. A few sponsor logos surrounded the link, and buttons marked "agenda" and "register", for those who wanted to forego the pitches and get straight to the meat, were tucked discretely at the bottom. But if a recipient clicked through, he or she was greeted with a video greeting that started with a few seconds of music and moving sponsor logos before going into the taped address.

The first message was an invitation from CMO Council Chair Jan Soderstrom. Her job was to re-assure potential enrollees that the event was not going to be a series of pitches, but rather a gathering of high-level executive peers.

Soderstrom is a known name within upper level marketing executives, Ware said. "To have her speak to people, many of whom have never seen her face, and personally invite them to attend gave a high level of important to the message."

The Soderstrom effort was followed by a pitch from Donovan Neale-May, a board member of the CMO Council and head of his own public relations agency. The third effort in the series featured a message from Cammie Dunaway, CMO of Yahoo. The fourth and final message featured both Dunaway and Neale-May.

Each individual was responsible for getting across a specific benefit. Soderstrom touted on the CMO Council's conference credentials, while Neale-May focused on the value of attendees engaging with each other, and how the conference's focus on networking was generated from the advisory board, which was made up of people like the message recipient. Finally, Dunaway provided a heavy hitter name as a C-level peer urging people to attend the conference. The joint appearance between Dunaway and Neale-May reinforced the idea of synergy between Yahoo and the CMO Council (the two organizations co-hosted Yahoo's Big Idea Awards this year.)

The messages ran in the two to two-and-a-half minute range. A daunting length, perhaps, but "this was new, and there weren't a lot of people doing it, Ware said. "We knew that would buy us 15 or 20 seconds." At that point, the featured speaker would pop up and begin his or her spiel.

In all cases, the videos of the speakers were accompanied by clean, simple graphics. These didn't distract from the invitation as much as reinforce it: The words reflected the key points of each speech as they were made.

The effort paid off. By the time the four communications had run, 235 members had enrolled in the program, at $1295 apiece. Not bad, considering that Ware wanted to cap enrollment at 300 people in order to preserve an intimate feel to the event.

Ware is pleased with the effort's success, and The Council will likely use the technique again with its high-revenue products. Will he make any differences when he designs the next campaign? "In the future, we'll gather all of the content that goes into each message before launching the campaign. For a four-week, four-part series, we needed at least a month of preparation time. In a lot of cases we were right up against deadline."