The web and the Big Apple come together once a year for Internet Week, a 7 day festival of events and seminars that showcases the best of what’s happening in the internet community.
The festival has continued to grow based in part on a unique philosophy that all interested companies and organizations are open to participate. As they say, “Like the Web itself, Internet Week is open: anyone can throw events citywide. No organization is too big or too small to be included. Open access for all!”
The marketing team needed an integrated email marketing solution that matched the site’s design for sending out updates to fans on events and announcements for the festival.
The design had to be flexible for adding various content and social media links yet intuitive to edit without touching any code. Swapping out banner ads had to be a snap for the staff for promoting sponsors like Ford, Yahoo! and Microsoft.
And it had to look consistent across 30 different email platforms and mobile devices.
The old Internet Week NY email template
Pulling inspiration off the design of the main site, we laid out the design to draw attention to the content with the most important pieces appearing first ‘above the fold’. We also included links and call to actions for connecting on Facebook and Twitter, as well as reminding readers to Tweet or post stories and upcoming events on these channels as well.
For ease of use with the staff, the template takes advantage of MailChimp’s easy text editor, so editing and writing content is as simple as writing a Word doc for the staff.
The banner ads can also be easily swapped out with a simple upload.
With updated templates, the email marketing for the event went off without a hitch. (We attended ourselves and were quite impressed with the panels and speakers.)
Looking at the analytics we saw an 80% increase in clicks on average on the new redesign.
However, it’s important to mention that the Internet Week team did a fantastic job of creating great content which helped tremendously with the increase in clicks.
An added benefit was an increase in the number of clicks to the brand's Twitter and Facebook pages, which was a key goal in the redesign as well. Stay tuned for next year’s event.