WebbyAwards.com Splash Page

Overview

The Webby Awards is considered by many to be the leading international award for honoring excellence on the internet. For 15 years and counting, The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences in conjunction with a 750-member body of leading Web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative celebrities, and Associate Members vote on Webby Award Winners and Nominees. And it’s one helluva good party every June in New York City.

In the fall of 2009 the Webbys launched a daily email named Netted. With a tagline of “Better Living Through the Internet”, each day the site recommends a single website, app, or service they deem worthwhile, indispensable, or even life changing - all expertly edited by the smart internet enthusiasts in their New York office.

Ironically, we’ve been following the daily Netted emails going back almost a year and have picked up a ton of great tips and sites on a daily basis.

Challenge

The Webby Awards enjoys a very strong brand reputation and relatively high site traffic. Netted’s strategy was to leverage the popularity of this digital property to drive new email subscriptions without occurring any additional cost-per-acquisitions for new subscribers.

Usability Research
Pouring over web design research consistently showed us that the fewer amount of actions asked of a user, the more likely they are to complete an action on a website. The opt-in form should ideally just ask for an email address. No names, addresses, countries, mother’s maiden names.  Research says: Less steps = better engagement.

Mobile
Another consideration with the ongoing adoption of smart phones was that the splash page had to look sharp on small screens and across all major platforms like iPhones, Androids and other mobile devices.

Solution

After mapping out the user sign-up experience with the Netted and Webby Awards team we came up with two ideas for getting Netted in front of the Webby audience.

1. The first was a one-time overlay that all new visitors to WebbyAwards.com would see. As a first-time visitor to the Webbys’ website users are shown a quick overlay telling them about Netted and the opportunity to subscribe. If they click “no thanks” they’re never shown the form again by adjusting the cookie settings.
   
   We started the process with some rough wireframes (left), then polished the design and developed the overlay.
   
   Initial testing of the design on mobile devices revealed the large size of the overlay to be somewhat unusable. It worked but we knew it could be better. To remedy this we created a miniature version of the overlay, then created some code logic to make sure it only gets shown on smaller screens and mobile devices.
    
2. The second piece of the puzzle was a new sign-up process for the Webby Awards email with the opportunity to also subscribe to Netted. In the new version, after subscribing to the Webby Awards visitors are prompted to also subscribe to Netted with just a single click.

Results

We’re big fans of baking measurement tools into everything we build for better marketing decisions. Source tracking was funneled into the MailChimp analytics dashboard and lets the Netted and Webby Awards marketing teams view exactly which channel a new subscriber came through.

Within a month after launch the two new sign-up forms have generated several thousand subscriptions at absolutely no acquisition costs to Netted. (Note: Affiliate marketers report that these acquisition costs can be up to several dollars per subscriber. Multiplied over tens of thousands of subscribers this gets to be a very costly yet necessary marketing expense)

With the upcoming Webby Awards show on the horizon, the Netted team is excited about using the tool to further grow their email list.

Stay tuned for a brand new email template design.