Blog for June 2013

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Visual Lizard's Summer Newsletter for 2013

Hey there everyone!

If you're a a partner, a friend, or a long time fan of ours, you likely received our very first official email newsletter yesterday. We ran a fun little contest in the newsletter, and we thought we'd share some data with you... as well as let you know who won!

First, lets take a look at the newsletter. We sent the email out through Emediatemail.com, our awesome service for creating and sending electronic newsletters. The numbers over the first 24 hours look like this:

vl-summer-2013-01

  • From our 4 lists under Visual Lizard, we sent to 1,131 contacts.
  • We've had a 34.99% unique open rate.
  • 82 people clicked giving us a 22.84% click rate.
  • Canada accounted for the most opens. USA was second. The Netherlands, third.
  • The top link clicked was more than halfway down, and was about the contest on www.visuallizard.com
  • The link attached to our "lizmouflage" banner at the top was second in total clicks.
  • We had a 1.07% (11 people) unsubscribe rate with 0% marking the email as spam.
  • Our website registered the most visits in a single day for this past year.

Overall, we're pleased with the results we saw from this newsletter. As part of the awareness campaign we're embarking on, we plan to send our newsletter out quarterly. We've set the bar pretty high with this first one!

Someone Said Something About a Contest?

Since summer is such a special time here in Winnipeg, we decided to pick an outdoor activity for our contest. We figured golf (which, admittedly, is not something everyone likes doing) would work for a prize. An all expense paid round was chosen, including beverages and lunch out at the prestigious Elmhurst Golf and Country Club.

The challenge was a scavenger hunt to find the golfball "icon" (clue #1) hidden somewhere on our website. We didn't want to make the contest too easy, so we made the icon subtle. Once you rolled over it there was a tooltip telling you "congratulations, you have found the golfball!". If you clicked it, an email launched with the subject line "I found the golfball".

The secret golfball icon!

We had some really creative answers. Some of the best were:

  • It's the Portage la Prairie School Division logo!!
  • I found it on your map. It's the little green pin golfball thing right? Right??
  • The golfball is on the side of the lizard's head.
  • We also saw several people use the search and look for "ball", "secret", "golf, and a few others.

Three hours after we launched the contest, Russ from MGEU was the first to spot the icon. We had placed it under Services > Email Campaigns. We actually debated putting it there as we thought it would be too obvious. It turned out to be the perfect spot. 45 minutes later, John from MNP also emailed in a correct answer, complete with screenshots and arrows.

Congratulations Russ and John for winning the first ever email contest from Visual Lizard! We're looking forward to an afternoon round in July with you. To our friends and partners, we apologize for the momentary loss of productivity. To everyone else that didn't get a chance to play (or didn't want to win a golf game), stay tuned; we plan on sending out another newsletter in the fall with more fun stuff!

Thanks for reading! If you have any specific questions, please don't hesitate to ask them in the comments, via twitter, or through the contact form.

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