Webinar email marketing case study

The case study below shows what you can expect to see from a webinar promotion campaign. There are many variables, but give enough experience, we can now say what you should achieve from an average webinar promotional campaign with Marketwise.  Below is an email marketing case study, based on a real campaign run by Marketwise in Q2 2022.

The Campaign

The customer wanted to promote a webinar that was due to go out in about three weeks time. After some discussions, the suggestion was to send two messages, one eight days before the webinar and a “last chance” message, sent the day before.  The customer provided a list of relevant job titles, some priority companies to target and also some countries to exclude (in this case China, Russia and Belarus).

Agreeing the size

Marketwise found just over 14,000 matching contacts, for a two message campaign, the cost would be around $4,500. The customer wanted to keep within a budget of $2,500, so Marketwise optimised the audience to focus mostly on Americas and Europe (since the webinar was not at a convenient time for Asia).  A size of 8,500 was agreed and the invoice accepted.

Email marketing campaign setup

The customer provided the HTML for the first message. After a review, Marketwise recommended some simple formatting changes, which were sent to the customer as an email test:

• • Removal of a typical spam phrase
  • Breaking up a large initial paragraph of text to improve skim-ability
  • Pulling out keywords into a simple bullet list.

The customer was able to quickly review and accept the changes.

A/B testing

Marketwise suggested running A/B testing of subject lines and worked with the customer to agree subject lines to try. In the end three subject lines were tested:

• • A simple statement
  • A question
  • A single keyword

Marketwise randomly selected 500 users for each test category and configured the tests to each run concurrently.  The A/B/C testing went out nine days before the webinar.  24 hours after the testing, the winning subject line was used (in this case the single word subject line) and the main mailing started.

Seven days later A/B/C testing was performed on the second HTML message, ahead of the reminder mailing and the “Last chance to register” message was sent to the winner.

If you have 8 minutes spare, this video on A/B testing give some nice examples with results.

The Results

Message 1: open rate of 13% and a click to open rate of 17.9%

Message 2: open rate of 12.6% and a click rate of 22.2%.

In actual numbers, it was 427 clicks, of which 89% (380) were on the Call to Action (CTA).

Contacts completing the CTA was 207, meaning the landing page converted a respectable 54% (this was provided by the customer).