Real Estate|Construction

Marketing - E-Mail

Situation

The HOK Planning Group, a master planning and urban design division of HOK Architects, one of the world's leading design firms, wanted to communicate directly with its target audiences via a medium that provided measurable results. In addition, they wanted to provide those audiences with information on The HOK Planning Group's latest work, new experts, awards and other content designed to build the corporate brand. Finally, the company wanted to drive traffic to their Web site.

Challenge

Each employee had their own databases and contact e-mails, so c21 had to work with various individuals to compile those databases and create one e-mail marketing database. In addition, the list contained only 750 e-mail addresses, and needed to grow.

c21 Solution

c21 implemented the launch of HOK Planning's bi-monthly e-mail newsletter program in late 2001. c21 and The HOK Planning Group developed an editorial calendar and a timeline to ensure that everyone understood responsibilities and deadlines for producing each issue of the bi-monthly e-newsletter. Some articles were written by c21, others by experts within the group. In addition, each newsletter provides a link to at least one outside source of information (e.g., the Congress for New Urbanism Web site), which lends added credibility. We included a "forward to a friend" feature, which allowed us to continue to grow the distribution list. In addition, c21 designed each story to be teaser length, to drive traffic to HOK Planning's site to read the complete story.

Results

The e-newsletter became an integral part of The HOK Planning Group's overall marketing effort. The recipient list grew from approximately 750 to more than 6,000, and each newsletter averages an open rate of approximately 45 percent. The e-mail newsletter also doubled visits to The HOK Planning Group Web site, making it an integral component of HOK's business development and marketing strategies.