I strongly believe that my clients’ successes are my successes, so I’m proud to share results from some of the campaigns we’ve done together.
Case Studies
The Challenge
Jay Baer of Convince & Convert, and Amber Naslund from Brass Tack Thinking – both luminaries in the field of business strategy as it applies to social media – were in the throes of finishing their new book, The NOW Revolution, and needed a central place online from which they could promote it.
They’re both incredibly active in social media, so they needed the site to be flexible enough to drive book sales, but also showcase the buzz happening around it, along with their upcoming 30-city book tour. Oh, and they needed the website ready for its grand unveiling at BlogWorld, one of the biggest social media conferences around – which was just over a month away…
The Solution
WordPress + Ashford to the rescue! WordPress’ ease of use in combination with the virtually limitless array of page layouts and functionality offered by the Ashford theme made it our first choice as the foundation for this highly dynamic and scalable site.
Given the variety of objectives that needed to be met with this project, we made a number of conscious design decisions:
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- Prominent hero section, with clear call to action & multiple sharing methods
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- All the photography emphasizes people, because that’s what social media is all about
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- Eyecatching call to subscribe for a free chapter
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- A second call-to-action for those who scroll further down the page
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- A variety of social activity is highlighted, building the overall brand audience
The Results
Speak for themselves. As of January 2011:
- The average visitor viewed 1.74 pages, and spent 1min 44secs per visit
- The site converted 17% of visitors into email subscribers. To quote Jay himself: “that’s ridiculously good. I’d take that right now for any client, in any industry.”
The Takeaway
Pairing open-source tools with compelling content enables us to assemble effective online presences quickly and easily, and attract an engaged audience – a process that’s only accelerated by purposeful design.
The Challenge
WindyNation is a young startup in the fine business of creating affordable and simple-to-build DIY wind turbine kits. They came to me in late 2010 with a small, but devout following of customers, and a brand new product that needed an email announcement that would generate buzz around the new kit, and kick-start their business going into the new year – a definite challenge, considering the heavy volume of sales and other messages flying around during this time of year.
Up to this point, the guys at WindyNation had been using some standard email templates from MailChimp, which had served them well. It was clear, though, that more could be done to elicit a better response from their loyal subscribers.
Click to enlarge
The Solution
Together, we completely redesigned WindyNation’s promotional email template and campaign landing page using well-known email best practices:
- Clear calls to action
- Concise, benefits-focused copy in both the subject line & body of the message
- Worked with existing photography to present it in an engaging way
How’d that work out for ya?
Pretty damn good! (It’d be a lame case study if it bombed, right?). The campaign posted new records across all the major metrics we tracked.
- Open rate: ⇧ 21%
- Clickthrough Rate: ⇧17%
- Avg. # of clicks per recipient: 1.48
The Takeaway
The lesson here is that even strong performing mailing lists can be significantly re-energized and taken to new heights with a good knowledge of email best practices, and a compelling message. Oh, and if you need email help, I’m your guy!