Client Description
Headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, NetOne is an elite network of security organizations with independently operating member companies located all across the US and Canada. NetOne Charter Shareholder companies are among the top 100 firms in an industry with more than 14,000 players, each possessing decades of experience providing quality, professional service, and a strong commitment to their community.
The Challenge
DesignHammer has been working with NetOne since 2015, updating and supporting their corporate Drupal website, including its extensive members-only section. NetOne’s in-house marketing team wanted more time to focus on member events and other strategic initiatives, so they engaged DesignHammer to help with website content and other marketing projects like a monthly newsletter. They expressed an interest in increasing the frequency of their email member outreach communications and help with a refresh and new engagement strategy.
The Solution
DesignHammer’s marketing and design team collaborated with NetOne to redesign and deploy the monthly newsletter in Mailchimp to better reflect NetOne’s latest website branding. NetOne and DesignHammer settled on a modern, yet simplistic theme that mirrored the current design of their website. DesignHammer also added new features to the NetOne site which would allow their communications team to tag content from within the Drupal CMS that they wanted to be included in their monthly email summary. To make their newsletter more accessible to members, DesignHammer also added an SMS feature to the website so members could request text updates any time a newsletter was shipped or a new post or comment was added to NetOne’s online forum thread.
Once content marketing conversations had been streamlined and after a few editions of their monthly and special edition“Year-In-Review” email newsletters had been delivered, NetOne’s Board of Directors requested the DesignHammer team identify the best way to design and mail physical copies of the newsletter to key stakeholders at each of their member organizations. DesignHammer’s marketing team produced a fresh design for the print versions of the monthly email newsletter, their 2019 “Year-In-Review”” newsletter, and a “How-To” instructional guide for updating SMS preferences on the NetOne website. These were sent to DesignHammer’s Cary-based print partner AlphaGraphics to be printed and bound into booklets. DesignHammer supervised mail distribution thereafter.
The Results
In 2017, NetOne’s monthly newsletter campaigns averaged a 40% open rate and 11% click rate, impressive considering Mailchimp’s open-rate and click-rate benchmarks for online communities land at 21% and 3% respectively. After DesignHammer assumed the monthly communications role, NetOne’s monthly newsletters maintained a strong open-rate average of 43%. The modest increase in views was outshined by a 20% click-rate average, almost doubling the previous year-over-year totals.
Because sales numbers are an important KPI for member companies, we collaborated with NetOne to add a new section to NetOne’s newsletter template that includes their top monthly Sales Leaders; previously sent out as separate communications. The list became the top-clicked link in each newsletter. The newsletter open-rate increase and top link metrics suggest that the decision to consolidate typical newsletter content and sales leaders into regular communications contributed to the success of the new campaigns, motivating subscribers to read featured newsletter content which may have gone overlooked in standalone campaigns that did not include a Sales Leader’s list.
