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E-mail Design & Planning
For the Indiana Office of Tourism Development, how did we reduce e-mail marketing costs by 50% while increasing e-mail open rates by 68 - 262%?
The previous IOTD e-mail program consisted of a "blast" e-mail
sent to 120,000 recipients per month. Every recipient got the same
e-mail, regardless of geographical location or travel interests.
Average open rates (13.5%) and click through rates (4.8%) were
lower than desired and valuable budget dollars were being wasted on
mailing to 77.5% of the list that never even opened the
e-mail.
An e-mail subscriber survey allowed us to better understand what
kind of content subscribers wanted to receive. Based on the survey
feedback, we divided what used to be a giant e-mail blast into
three specific e-mails based on categories of interest, and
requested that subscribers re-opt-in to the receive e-mails; we did
this to ensure the mailing list included only those users who were
loyal and engaged.
The results? The new permission e-mail program cost half as much
to send as their prior program and generated almost four times the
leads. Open rates of the targeted e-mails shot up to as high as
49%, resulting in an average of 4,259 unique visitors clicking
through to the VisitIndiana.com website each send.
Update: January 2010
This Williams Randall-created e-mail program was recognized
nationally by MarketingSherpa and received the Gold Award for
Consumer Email Campaign of the Year at MarketingSherpa's annual
Email Summit.
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