Last month we won gold in the MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Awards for ‘Best Dynamic Content or Personalized Email for our Social Media Series’ email messages. I feel really great about this award because we won over companies like Microsoft.

The reason we made it to the podium for this award was because of the way we built our email list. We created a list that we knew would be interested in our Social Media Series, which gave us amazing open and click through rates for every campaign.

When we launched the campaign back in October we announced our series everywhere we could think of. In our email marketing newsletter, on our social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and in our community, our VR Marketing Lounge just to name a few. We used up all of our resources up front. This did two things for us. First of all we had people signing up for a webinar that was schedule for February, 4 months after we launched the campaign to build our social media webinar list, which minimized the work we had to do at the end of the project. And then we had a new list of over 2,000 people who we knew were interested in social media topics.

Once I had this list I would send an email invite for the next social media webinar about a week before the webinar. On average these invites had above a 30% open rate. As you know, anything above 20% you can consider really good, so 30% was fantastic! After every webinar the list grew because more and more people were recommending and finding the webinar series.

We would also send follow up emails to everyone who attended and registered but couldn’t make it. These follow ups all had 40%+ open rates and click rates that ranged from 20% to 49%. These are the award-winning numbers.

By building your list from scratch and presenting your audience with content they are interested in you can get real results. It’s all about how much you know about your audience.

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