CASE STUDY: EMAIL MARKETING
In 2003, my attention turned to my alma mater and I sought a volunteer role with the USC Alumni House.
As a member of the tech committee on the Board of Directors of the recently formed USC Alumni Club, my group inherited the ability to communicate with a set of alumni who had opted-in to receive emails.
The new alumni organization had collected over 3000 names via the simple “listserv” software setup by the IT on campus, but our needs quickly grew to require additional features added to the user experience.
We wanted to ask our audience specific questions based on the type of event being promoted, and this was not possible with the tools provided by USC.
We still needed to be nimble, however...
At the very next board meeting, the tech committee proposed the following solution:
We voted on two motions: seek approval (immediately) to use a service hosted outside the USC firewall (citing E-VITE as the industry leader) and begin development of an RSVP system on our own server.
We quickly realized we could build something even better than E-VITE, designed specifically for Trojan Networking, so we set off to communicate our vision in the form of a prototype.
My colleague and I designed and built a system we called USCVITE, a play on words I came up with based on the phonetics of the other platform.
The laws pertaining to email marketing are very straightforward. In order to eliminate the risk to USC stakeholders, we did not import the contact data into our new system.
Rather, we would succeed in the impossible goal of migrating the data by creating a value proposition in the call to action "click here" opportunity distributed via the legacy system:
“Sign up to receive EXCLUSIVE offers only available when you OPT-IN to our new USCVITE event invitation platform.”
Subscriber numbers exceeded 3000 in less than 90 days, and while we could not technically compare the two lists to datamine for a differential, we believe we reached our goal of driving most (if not all) of the legacy contacts over to the new system.
As a result of our efforts, the leadership at the Alumni House took us to breakfast and pitched us on officially extending invitations to other alumni groups to join and utilize our software.
We had already built landing pages for charter members SOUTH BAY, SAN GABRIEL VALLEY and WEST LOS ANGELES and set up multiple event invites internally for these regional clubs.
Joint venture events designed to extend our reach included such activities as the USC ALUMNI SOFTBALL LEAGUE, HOLLYWOOD BOWL SERIES, DODGER GAMES and even a WINE TASTING (USC Caravan) to Los Olivos hosted by the USC ALUMNI CLUB OF SANTA BARBARA. The weekenders and AWAY GAMES were super popular once we had a contact in the ticket office for discounts.
For my efforts organizing and executing networking events nationwide which fostered partnerships with multiple regional USC ALUMNI organizations, I was nominated for and won the prestigious WIDNEY ALUMNI HOUSE AWARD.
