Tag Archives: email

Securing Attendees For World’s Largest Security Conference

RSAC-2014-theme
Campaign to drive attendance as we had 3 years running

Challenge:

RSA Conference is the world’s largest IT security conference, bringing together computer security experts to network, share ideas, new products, and new ideas. The Conference takes place annually in San Francisco and in Singapore.

RSA Conference began in 1991 so keeping the conference new and interesting and growing and maintaining attendance year over year can be a challenge.

Strategy:

In my fourth year on the account, it was difficult to think of new ways to drive attendance. Email and search marketing continued to be effective channels, helping us do an excellent job of securing repeat attendees but were having less success with prospects. But we needed a way to grow attendance.

Our Approach: We needed to broaden our net, attract new audiences–younger IT practitioners, women, and those interested in IT security as part of their jobs/businesses in industries such as finance and health care.

To attract these audiences, we needed fresh marketing and marketing collateral.

Campaign included emails, banners, mobile and web ads.
Email campaign featuring cryptography and a mystery to be solved
Email campaign featuring speaker and social media game

My Role In The Solution:

I developed a marketing campaign that spanned email, direct mail, web, print, outdoor, and social channels. The campaign centered on multimedia content, images that reflected the audiences we wanted to attract, and infographics that educated and entertained.

I developed the Conference theme–Share. Learn. Secure. I served as creative director, leading visual designers and copywriters to design the Conference marketing collateral, venue signage, street signs, rich media ads, email templates, augmented reality mailers, and infographics.

Each info graphic targeted an audience segment and delivered key messaging on why attending RSA Conference was important in protecting their data, assets, and customers.

Results:

Year-over-year double-digit increase in attendance.

Winning Big With Google’s Small Business Customers

Challenge:

Google, a leader in Internet and ad tech products and services, needed to grow engagement and online advertising spend among millions of small businesses–starting with the 2.8M small business owners who had created an AdWords account.

Given that small businesses spend less than 3% of their marketing budgets on online advertising, and AdWords is a complex product that businesses large and small struggle to master, increasing spend among  the nearly 3M small business AdWords account holders was be no small feat.

Strategy:

Make it simple and personal. We started with what we (actually Google) knew about their account holders and used that as the foundation of our strategy–basically their email addresses and the details of their accounts and campaigns. We used this information to create a hyper-targeted email campaign that used brief copy and a simple graphical format to provide personalized recommendations for their current or next campaign.

But the campaign wasn’t just a campaign–it was the start of an ongoing conversation and the beginning of a new relationship.

Account holders who acted upon our advice triggered subsequent emails and new recommendations based on their new account/campaign elections. And so began an increasingly lucrative relationship.

My Role In The Solution:

I was part of a great team of talented designers, developers, program and project managers. To this team and project I contributed…

  • Developed the creative strategy and provided creative direction for all of the content (video, web copy, visuals, UX)
  • Developing the content strategy for the emails
  • Writing all copy for the first campaigns
  • Managing copywriters, designers, and HTML developers who produced subsequent campaigns
  • Serving as creative director for the email and landing page design
  • Designing the A/B testing strategy to identify highest-converting

Results:

Double-digit increases in email click-through rates and AdWords spend, and quadrupled growth in our business with Google.