AMA Turns to Silverpop to Execute an Ongoing eNewsletter

Company Profile
American Management Association is dedicated to building the knowledge, skills and behaviors that will help business professionals and their organizations grow and prosper. The AMA, founded in 1923, is a global not-for-profit, membership-based association, which provides a full range of management development and educational services to individuals, companies and government agencies throughout the world. Each year, thousands of business professionals acquire the latest business know-how, valuable insights and increased confidence at AMA seminars, conferences briefings and executive forums, as well as through AMA books, research and print and online self-study courses.

The Challenge
AMA had a variety of goals for its email initiative including: enhancing its online presence, driving people to the website, promoting its brand, and ultimately selling more seminars, memberships, books and conference registrations. To achieve these goals, the organization decided to develop a monthly electronic newsletter to its past program attendees and recent inquirers.

The Solution
The AMA turned to a company that could provide knowledge and experience in planning and executing an ongoing eNewsletter--Silverpop. Silverpop suggested a framework that allowed the AMA to publish a comprehensive monthly newsletter, allowing recipients to register for the new eNewsletter, opt-out of the eNewsletter, forward the publication on to others, and provide suggestions and comments. In addition, Silverpop recommended that the AMA create "test" and "control" versions of content to see what marketing tactics worked best with its audiences. In order to best analyze results of the monthly project, Silverpop designed a custom Campaign Reporting site that utilized summary data and OLAP technology.

Silverpop's experienced project team worked with internal HTML artists and development engineers to design the HTML newsletter template and implement all the supporting web forms for registration, forward to a friend, unsubscribe, edit profiles, and the comments page. The registration forms were placed throughout the AMA Web site, attracting Web visitors to sign up for the free eNewsletter.

Once the overall template and forms were created, the next step was to cleanse the existing database. The database was de-duplicated and segmented into multiple audiences such as those who had taken an AMA seminar, those who opted-in for the eNewsletter from the website, etc. In order to maximize the effect of the newsletter, each audience received slightly different content.

The Results
As each month passed, the opt-in e-Newsletter subscriptions kept growing with new and interested people coming in via the AMA website. Meanwhile, the AMA tested different variables including send times, day of the week, subject lines, from lines, image placements, and personalization. Each variable led to more information about its audiences' preferences. As the knowledge base grew, so did the revenue potential. The AMA gathered more than 8,000 subscriptions through the website alone, and the newsletter currently goes to four targeted segments, each getting slightly different versions, totaling near 100,000 recipients per month.

Because of the advanced levels of testing and modeling, open and click-through rates for the eNewsletter were extraordinary--as is typically the case in one-to-one communications. Given the success of the eNewsletter, the AMA has come to rely more heavily on email promotions and continues to use Silverpop to execute e-marketing initiatives.

American Management Association
www.amanet.org

Silverpop
www.silverpop.com