Case Study: Rapid City Email Animation

It’s no simple task to improve CTR for emails that already have rich content from a beautifully scenic town like Rapid City, SD. This applies especially to emails that are sent to a particularly niche audience. Digital Edge builds custom templates, and manages email designs and content for subscribers to the newsletter that are interested in meetings and conventions planning.

We have been able to keep meeting planners engaged using many techniques that we have mastered from our years of experience working in meetings and conventions marketing for destinations. We design emails with rich visuals of group-oriented activities and provide content buckets in the body with images and copy that focus on important features of the destination to meeting planners: new developments, affordable and accessible venues, and adventurous excursions that can be easily worked into meeting itineraries.

But now that we had hit a ceiling on CTR, it was time to take our storytelling to the next level…

Our Solution

The creative team had been experimenting with email animation for other Digital Edge DMO clients, but we weren’t sure how it would translate to niche business-oriented subscribers.

Would incorporating animation help our click-through rate (CTR) or would this modern technique be read like spam, be seen as too loud, and result in a scary increase in “unsubscribers”?

Digital Edge didn’t want to lose too many subscribers from a creative risk; so prior to committing to a full template change, we designed an experiment; and the results were fantastic!

The Results

Looking at the Rapid City promotional emails over a four month time period, our email manager, Courtney Godwin, used September as a baseline for the experiment. The September email did not have an animated header and resulted in a respectable 1.06% click-through rate.

In October however, we featured animation and the CTR almost doubled! October’s send had a 2.02% CTR. Digital Edge needed one more month of solid results before we knew that our custom email template needed to change to include animation. Since the October email performed so well,  we animated November’s header as well.

While the email’s 1.31% CTR was lower that month, it was still a bit higher than the non-animated September email. So, to round out our test in December, we switched back to a non-animated header, and that email had a 1.18% CTR.  Comparing these four emails, the data indicates that both animated emails performed better than the two which weren’t animated.

Are you looking to increase your CTR for your DMO’s Meetings Marketing Emails?

At Digital Edge, we are always looking for a way to tell stories better and to engage audiences. We tell stories about amazing places, and we do it better than anyone else. We are experts in niche audiences like meeting planners and know how to test innovative new ideas to accomplish new goals, whether it’s to increase your open rate, CTR or RFPs, we can design a perfect customized email template for your destination, and we can make sure the monthly content is fresh and compelling.

For more information about Digital Edge’s email marketing program, learn more here!

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