Case Studies

Vector Media Group, on delivering high-performing email campaigns for their clients

Marketing agencies are always pushing for the best value when delivering campaigns for their clients, so it's always awesome to hear how they competitively offer email marketing (while still making a buck). We spent a moment with Matt Weinberg from Vector Media Group to discuss how email fits into their agency offering and share some of their successes.

Hi Matt, Vector Media Group has been a customer of ours for a while now. What were you looking for when you were initially searching for an email service provider? Why did you choose Campaign Monitor?

The most important factors for us were ease of use for us and our clients, and good reliability and deliverability (whitelisting). We'd had major blacklisting issues on other ESPs because of spammy behavior from their other customers, so we chose a higher quality service, being Campaign Monitor.

"A good email marketing program can have the best response rates of any other advertising or customer reach-out."

Vector Media Group offers a number of services, including web development, search advertising and social media consultation. Does email marketing compliment these other services? How?

Absolutely. We find it a huge complement to our online marketing services. A good email marketing program can have the best response rates of any other advertising or customer reach-out. Our strategy often entails figuring out the average lifetime monetary value of a newsletter signup for our client, and counting each signup our advertising efforts drive as a conversion that builds towards the full return on investment.

From a development side, we're finding more and more clients asking us about integrating email marketing with their content management system. We build almost all our sites on ExpressionEngine (we're members of their Pro Net), so Experience Internet's Campaigner Extension has been very valuable to sync mailing lists. Also, we'll often create an email template in the CMS and setup publishing tools for the client to choose the articles and products they'll be featuring. It's then an easy import to Campaign Monitor using the "Get from URL" tool.

What kind of clients do you work with, and what have been your biggest challenges when selling email marketing to them?

We work with a wide variety of clients, ranging from small startup eCommerce stores to publishers receiving millions of visitors each month. Our biggest challenge has consistently been explaining the limits of HTML in email, as opposed to what they can do on the web. The design needs to work in the email clients their customers use, not just on the web browser preview we show them!

Has the effort spent on email paid off for your clients? If so, give us a brief example of a successful email program you've run.

It has. A recent example is with a client that essentially had kept their newsletter on autopilot since it started; new customers would get signed up, but the same email template went out to all the subscribers every week with no active segmenting or testing. We brought them onto the system last year and immediately started using Campaign Monitor's A/B testing for subject lines and email content. We also worked with them to take a more active role in choosing the email content: what worked previously? What products are hot right now? What kinds of exclusive email-only deals can they offer?

The changes have been so successful that they've even started taking the time to do completely custom designs for every email instead of just using a few templates, having seen that it's worth the additional effort and expense.

Finally, what is your 'pro tip' for other design agencies that are planning to offer email marketing?

Treat an email signup as a true "conversion point" on the site, just like a sale, account creation, or any other interaction you're aiming for. Emails have the benefit of being more immediate and measurable than almost any other kind of customer interaction, and taking advantage of that will help your clients enormously.

Many thanks to Matt for sharing his experiences with us. Visit Vector Media Group to learn more about their services.