In the last year we have put a lot of time and effort into creating a solid email marketing campaign. What has been so unbelievable about the campaign is the growing support that we have been receiving from various departments around campus. I’ll save it for another post to really look at the various departments and how they are using our mailshot system to communicate with constituents, but wanted to share an excellent example of how it can drive traffic to your website. For Wofford’s e-mail marketing we use Bronto and to reduce confusion on campus refer to it as mailshot instead of list distribution or blast email or any of the other names out there.

For higher education Christmas break is usually one of the deadest visit times. I’m sure there are a few prospective students out there who visit the site as they whittle down their list of colleges, but for the most part people stay away and spend time with their family and loved ones. As a lot of people have suggested putting together a top ten list is an excellent way to get people connected one final time over the holidays and a mailshot is the perfect avenue to promote these lists. For our end of year we put together two such lists, one list for the top ten news stories and the other for top ten videos/soundslides. Soundslides are videos that are made up of pictures with an audio track on the backend. What is so good about soundslides is that assuming you have the pictures and an audio track they are VERY easy and quick to put together.  Watch some of our videos and see for yourself.

So anyways we sent four emails out promoting this list each tailored towards a different target group. The messages were sent to alumni, prospective students, news, and website updates.  Without getting into to much detail let’s just say we sent close to 40,000 messages and had over 20% open rate. Assuming each click through back to the site was unique we gained an extra 1,734 visitors back to the site during this slow time! Not bad and quite impressive if you ask me.

Below is the traffic data pulled from our Google Analytics account from December 15th to the end of the year. The blue is for 2007 and the green is for 2006. For the last week it’s pretty similar, but notice that big spike? We sent out our mailshots Dec. 18th-20th.

During this two week period here are some other interesting statistics:

• Visits up 26%
• Absolute Unique Visitors up 89%
• Average Pageviews up 52%
• Time on Site up 23%
• Bounce Rate down 18%
• New Visitors up 24%

Absolute Unique Visitors is the most exciting statistic there! I’m sure it’s not the only factor, but mailshots definitely have to account for a large part of the growth in this small sample!  Want to learn more then sign-up for our mailshots and see for yourself.