We had you at magic, right? Bad Feather recently had great success using an email marketing campaign to promote this year’s Sonic Union party. Maybe you’ve seen the self-mailing poster invite we created last year? We got loads of positive feedback on the design and we’re told the party was one for the record books. When we sat down to brainstorm ideas for this year’s party, the folks at Sonic Union were interested in promoting the event digitally. It is 2010 after all, and in addition to being a greener and more interactive approach, we saved some serious cash by eliminating printing and postage.
Aside from rethinking the distribution of the invitation, we wanted to design an invite to reflect Sonic Union’s industry reputation of being darn good party people. On our end the ideas started flowing with the mention of the Zoltar machine that would be one of several party attractions. We created this digital poster design that we felt appropriately conveyed 100% FUN.
The poster design was embedded in an HTML email campaign sent to an initial list of invitees. We sent this through a 3rd party service, utilizing their list management capabilities to wrangle the guest list (If you’re wondering, Bad Feather favors Campaign Monitor and Mail Chimp for our email mailing list needs). The invite R.S.V.P. linked users to a custom form page which we configured to populate to a second mailing list. By R.S.V.P.ing, party attendees were automatically creating a new database of confirmed guests. As the party date grew closer, we were able to use this new mailing list to send reminders to guests and ultimately to export the names of the party-goers to a printable spreadsheet to be checked off by security at the door. It also came in handy when it was time to send some fabulous party photos.
Within 24 hours of the initial email invite, more than 25% of the guest list had confirmed attendance. We attribute this to the 2-click ease of the R.S.V.P. process (and of course to the sexy invite design). The week of the party, a reminder email resulted in more than 60% of the guest list R.S.V.P.ing, guaranteeing the Sonic Union headquarters would be pretty much at capacity. We Bad Feathers represented at this years shindig and upon arrival the place was, as they say, bumpin’.
Email marketing party magic success!
