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TradeDoubler is a digital marketing company that operates across 16 European countries. With an in-depth knowledge of multiple industry sectors, TradeDoubler helps to deliver online sales targets for more than one thousand of Europe’s top blue-chip online advertisers.
In order to continue to grow and develop its reputation, TradeDoubler is committed to building long-term profitable partnerships with its advertisers and network of website publishers.
The annual TradeDoubler Summit is the company’s key event and is integral to developing these partnerships.
As Jennifer Cheung, TradeDoubler’s Marketing Manager, explains, "it’s our flagship conference event. It is specifically invite only and we target our top advertisers, top publishers and the best new business prospects."
In 2007, TradeDoubler trebled the size of the Summit. As Cheung says, this meant managing the communications had evolved into something the company was unable to handle internally.
"The event was three times bigger than anything we’d done before. It simply couldn’t have been handled in house; not in terms of collating all the information about delegates, of making it simple to get personalised messages out to key people, in effectively and efficiently running an eight step campaign."
Already a client of Concep, the decision to utilise Concep Campaigner and bring the use of forms to the forefront of the campaign was a simple one for Cheung.
"We were already using Concep for various newsletter communications both internally and externally, so it made sense to run Campaigner for our Summit. We had a list of 550 top contacts, as well as potential speakers and sponsors. We wanted to keep in contact with these people regularly, keep them informed about the event, get them to register and to attend."
The challenge for TradeDoubler is that the Summit is a free event, so registration is not a clear sign of commitment.
"For us there is a big difference between those who register and those who commit. One of the things we really focused on with the campaign was to ensure that registrations converted, that there was minimal churn," says Cheung.
TradeDoubler executed a campaign, from an initial Save The Date email through to post-event communication, that according to Concep’s senior account manager, Anna Scott, was "planned and rolled out according to the textbook; it was close to the perfect use of Concep Campaigner's forms capability."
The TradeDoubler Summit took place on September 19, 2007. Two months earlier the first email was sent. "We sent our list a first invite," says Cheung. "It was very short and to the point, explaining where and when the event was happening. It was in this email that we created a save the date download that recipients could put into Outlook."
Just under 50% of the recipients of this first email made use of the save the date feature. But this wasn’t all. TradeDoubler also included information for potential sponsors and created a voting system to help shape the agenda of the Summit.
"At this stage the speaker programme hadn’t been finalised," Cheung explains. "So we asked our contacts to vote for what they wanted to hear about and what topics they felt were important."
"This was really useful – the results were live, so we could see very easily what items were most popular and base our programme around that. The idea was to make the event a consultative process, to get buy in from the delegates. We didn’t just want to talk at them, we wanted them to help shape the day, so they could get information that was genuinely useful to their business."
According to Cheung, this went a long way to tackling the issue of how to convert registrations.
"Immediately people felt they were getting much more value out of the event. Even though they haven’t made a financial commitment to attend, they still would have felt they were losing out by not being there."
Twenty per cent of recipients voted and helped shape the event. By Cheung’s admission this might not be a huge number, but “it is still a step away from what anyone else in the industry does. Most people who run conferences don’t ask that of their delegates.”
The next step was to resend the taster invite to those who had not viewed. By simply going into Campaigner, TradeDoubler were able to view those who had not opened the original email and push the message one more time. Cheung shrugs this off as "simply email best practice" but as Scott argues, this kind of scrutiny is often overlooked seldom seen. Not many businesses fully harness the power of email.
One month after the initial taster email, TradeDoubler sent the invitations. This was the first stage in the campaign in which Forms were used. The email included full details of the programme – from the 9am start, through the list of speakers, ancillary events and on to the after party – links through to a Summit microsite, and a registration form.
"The form allowed us to collect names, contact details, company names as well as information about which parts of the day the delegate wished to attend,” explains Cheung. “The system enabled us to check – on an hourly basis – how many names were coming in and who was registering. If there were names that should have been there but were missing our client services team could follow up. They would place calls with our hottest targets and check that the invitation had been received and check whether they were having any difficulties with registration. This system gave us the ability to follow up on a daily basis and encourage the registration process."
A reminder email followed, which was de-duped against those who had already registered – “to make sure we swept up everyone we could!” says Cheung. By this stage of the campaign TradeDoubler had driven 395 people to register through the form. The previous year’s event had 150 delegates.
"The forms were brilliant," says Cheung. "Without them we wouldn’t have been able to do any of this. Not only were the forms in the email, but we also hosted them on the microsite. It meant that we could direct people to a TradeDoubler Summit URL by word of mouth, in phone conversations and so on. Everything was centralised and funnelled back through to the one system. It gave us a single view and full visibility. We knew what activity we had undertaken so we could monitor and track everything, looking for spikes in activity."
Five days before the Summit, a delegate confirmation email was sent to those who had registered. This had a view rate of 72%. According to The Marketing Sherpa, Email Marketing Benchmark Guide, the industry average is 26%. According to Scott, "these are amazing statistics and demonstrate better than anything that TradeDoubler planned and executed their campaign supremely well. The figures demonstrate how well TradeDoubler had interacted with their audience."
Of the 395 who registered, 283 people attended. This represents a churn of just 28%, and an attendance almost double that of the previous year. Given TradeDoubler’s goal of creating a bigger event with a high conversion rate of registrations to delegates, these figures mark a resounding success.
For Cheung though the benefits ran deeper still. Not only did the effective communications and simplified registration get bums on seats, it also alleviated stress internally.
"The streamlined processes, the automation, were critical. The Summit is such a huge event and communications is just one part of that. The easier and more reliable communications is, the better for the sanity of the team. It was great to know that we could simply trust it to work, and to work well."
Also, the simplification of the process, allied to the consistency of the messaging, created a subtle yet powerful impression on the delegates.
"The consistency of the messaging was a real bonus. Every email was recognisably from TradeDoubler, and recognisably about the Summit,” Cheung says. “Everything came from the same address, it always looked the same, had the same template and the same tone of voice. The microsite was branded the same, the forms were amazingly simple. All of this clarity and consistency ran through to the day itself. The HTML capability meant that the branding of the event came through really strongly. The emails, the signage, the delegate packs, all looked thoroughly professional. It was as though it should have been a paid for event. Exactly what we were after."
deDoubler’s “textbook” use of forms didn’t just pay dividends for the 2007 Summit. They are also helping to shape future events.
"Post event, we used forms to collate delegate feedback," Cheung explains. "We gathered delegates’ opinions on the day, what they thought of the format, the timings, their impression of the different speakers and presentations. We were able to get a lot of really specific, useful detail that will help to inform how the Summit runs in 2008."
As ever, Cheung is adamant that there are some things that won’t be changing for 2008’s summit. TradeDoubler was so pleased with what Concep brought to 2007’s Summit that she “won’t change anything about the way in which we run communications for future events.”
