How a Marketing Organization Achieved an

80+% Email Click-through via Rich Media

Webcasts
by Kimberly Smith
Case study published on 6/26/2007

Company: CMO Council

Location: Palo Alto, California
Contact: Liz Miller, Vice-President of Operations
Industry: Nonprofit, B2B
Annual revenue: Confidential
Number of employees: Confidential
Quick Read:
When it comes to email marketing to marketing executives, standing out from the crowd can
be quite a challenge. Such was the case for the CMO Council, an invitation-only marketing
organization made up of more than 3,000 high-level executives from leading corporations
worldwide. Representing the likes of Dell Computer, Nike Corp., Sony, and Coca-Cola, these
members are the marketers who frequently "push the needle" and set the trends that inspire
others.
When planning for the CMO Council's 2006 Summitwhich took place late last year in two
citiesCouncil leaders faced the dual challenge of effectively reaching busy members while
maintaining the group's reputation for innovation and cutting-edge technology. Video stood
out as a potential way to capture the attention and respect of these members, and ON24, Inc.,
a webcasting and media marketing services provider, showed the Council how it could
integrate personalized webcasting into a new email format.
The new approach paid off, resulting in the Council's best-ever email campaign. The 2006
summit emails received a 99% open rate and an 80+% click-though rate and led to a host of
early registrations for its two summit events.
The Challenge:
The CMO Council is a private, nonprofit organization made up of senior marketing executives;
membership is by invitation only. Members work toward furthering the stature, credibility, and
understanding of strategic marketing among business executives. Hence, this is a
sophisticated audience that isn't easily impressed.
CMO Council executives had this in mind as they thought about new ways to promote their
2006 Summita two-part event consisting of a North America Summit, to be held in October
in San Francisco, and a Europe Summit, to be held in London in November.
Email marketing had always played a pivotal role in the Council's event promotion, but the
success rates were waning. In past years, Council email campaign open rates had typically
been 80-85%, largely due to its highly qualified list of members who were honored to be in
the association. But as the Council sent out more email announcements, combined with the

hundreds of emails these members typically received each day, the open rates had dwindled to
55-60%.
The Council needed to differentiate its messages and cut through the clutter if it was going to
get results.
"It came to our attention that our email marketing [had reached] the point where there was a
lot of great content, but not that 'wow' factor," said Liz Miller, vice-president of operations for
the CMO Council. "Our members are very savvy.... [To maintain our brand] we need to be
ahead of that curve, to know about technology heading down the pipe before our members
do."
The Campaign:
While partnering with the CMO Council on a separate initiative, ON24, Inc., a webcasting and
media marketing services provider, introduced the idea of using webcasts within email
promotions.
"They brought it to us as a new platform and a personalized, engaging format to interact with
our members," explained Miller. This, they believed, would reinforce the CMO Council's
reputation for cutting-edge marketing and technological innovation while encapsulating the
Summit's theme that year: The Power of Engagement.
With this in mind, both sides began brainstorming and mapped out a promotion schedule that
would entail a series of emails to tout both the North American and the European Summits.
Each email included a distinct message that built upon the preceding communications and
embraced several key components to appeal to the target market:

Personalization incorporating peer-to-peer interaction: Each email was addressed to

the member by name and presented as a personal invitation to connect with a well-known fellow
marketer. The CMO Council tapped its Advisory Board to find spokespersons who members
would view both as peers and frontrunners in the industry. These people included Yahoo Chief
Marketing Officer Cammie Dunaway, Symantec Vice-President of Marketing Amanda Jobbins, and
the CMO Council's own executive director, Donovan Neale-May.

Tight, "punchy" copy: Prior to this campaign, the CMO Council had sent out lengthy
emails with comprehensive information promoting all the event's offerings, including the agenda
as well as listings of topics and speakers. ON24 recommended shortening the message and
instead focusing on the novelty of the technologyand "interaction" with the speaker within the
webcastto deliver the pertinent information.The resulting message was straight to the point
with a clear call to action. It read, "Dear (Member): Meet Cammie Dunaway, chief marketing
officer at Yahoo!. Please click on the link below...," then provided the link. The subject line, "CMO
Council Summit: Members Only Invitation," was also crisp and enticing, and the video offered
recipient-centric advantages for attending the Summit in succinct one-and-a-half- or two-minute
presentations.

User-friendly technology: Webcasting was an exciting new medium, but it also had to be
seamless to keep the recipient's attention. Therefore, when a CMO Council member clicked on
the email link, they were taken to a webcast page that immediately launched the streaming
video and allowed users to pause or replay the recording as desired. Users did not have to wait
for the video to load, and it played continuously, without pausing to reload."We made sure that
the video was in a format that wouldn't take up a lot of bandwidth so that regardless of
computer requirements, users could view it quickly and easily," said Cece Salomon-Lee,
marketing communications manager at ON24, Inc. Moreover, the screen displayed tabs that
linked directly to the agenda and registration pages on the 2006 Summit website so that users
could obtain further information.

To keep the Summit fresh in the minds of its attendees-to-be, a fourth email containing a
compilation video was also sent out just before the event. Webcasts were even shown at the
entrance of the Summit venues during the events, in order to further connect with the
attendees and spur conversation.
The entire process took about three weeks from the time the Council okayed the project to
when ON24 delivered the rich media webcast. ON24's back-end reporting system allowed the
Council to measure the number of recipient views, average viewing time, and user interaction,
all in real-time.
The Results:
The Council members' reaction? They were impressed. The rich media campaign clearly
captured their attention, boasting a 99% open rate and 80+% click though rate for the first
round of emails promoting the San Francisco event.
"The concept of that level of peer interaction piqued a lot of people's interest," said Miller. "A
very high level [of recipients who opened the email] then clicked on the link and viewed the
message from Cammie, which became a very important tool in our promotion of the Summit;
it gave us another entree and a very valuable one to open that dialogue with them."
The campaign also prompted significant early registration for the event, filling 235 of the 300
spots by the time the final compilation video email was sent out. "A side perk was that there a
lot of interest early on so there was no last-minute push for registrations, [and we] could focus
on other things such as staging the summit," Miller said.
The European campaign also fared well, experiencing a 45% increase in its open rate and an
equally strong.