On March 22, 2022, we sent the first edition of the “EFFECT” to 303 subscribers. A year has now passed and a second issue has been sent. 52 went out to the courts of over 4400 subscribers, consisting of everything from market managers in some of Norway's largest companies to marketing students to entrepreneurs who are trying to get their first customer.
In this article you will learn what we have learned on the way, what it has cost us and, of course, what results it has given.
Let's rewind to start.
In January 2022 we moved the entire INEVO office to Gran Canaria for a week. When we ordered the trip it was to celebrate that the covid was over, but right there we were probably a little early out.
It was in Gran Canaria that we decided to launch a new newsletter. The newsletter itself was not something that was new to us. In 2017, we started the SEO newsletter, which was a weekly newsletter about everything that had to do with search engine optimisation - we sent out over 160 editions of it. We had also started a newsletter for Google Ads and one for social media.
The plan was to put these on the shelf to focus our efforts on making the best and only newsletter you needed to read to keep you up to date on digital marketing.
To solve this problem, we decided to become our own customer. Today, 24 Norwegian companies have one ”Operating Market Assistant“ (OMA) from INEVO, which is part of their market department and is a digital marketer with one of Norway’s best professional environments of 30 people in the back.
Markus Wachek Johnsen was responsible for implementation with the support of other INEVO members, including strategy and design. The next step was to figure out what to call it -- for everyone agreed that the INEVO Newsletter would not work.
After some rounds back and forth, we named “EFFECT” (because that is what we all want out of marketing). The goal of the project is to make more businesses aware of INEVO -- so the day when demand arises they'll remember us.
The EFFEC must be a concist, contain the most important updates and you should not have to click out of the newsletter to bring the most important. After a few weeks of processing the country we in a format for the newsletter consisting of 4 columns:
- 2-4 principals --a summary of the most interesting things we've read over the week.
- 1 case from our own professional environment - shows our own expertise and reflection around themes, preferably blog posts or LinkedIn posts from employees.
- 5 From Internet - other updates and news it's worth bringing along.
- Week of recommendation - podcast episodes, webinars, books, movies, Chrome extensions, etc.
How we have gotten 4400 market participants to subscribe
The first 303 subscribers came primarily from our previous newsletters. We decided not to use the old lists, but we would advise those who were registered to be terminated and replaced by EFFEC. We also announced some of the Instagram and FB and organic entries on a pair of INEVO employees' LinkedIn profiles.
The plan for further growth was based on that we would be able to generate word ofmouth and attract attention with professional posts at LinkedIn. It didn't work very well. Here are a few examples of articles that generated some in-post messages:
Entries that have content original content with a form of "tease" of results worked best.
But most of the articles only gave 5-10 entries.
Not so nice, but the growth shoots in the weather when we focus on advertising.
As you can see on the graph above, it's pretty clear when we started focusing on the advertising and the results it gave. At the end of the autumn of 2022 we submitted a survey on the “Thank you” page for those who have joined. Here we wanted to find out where they heard about us.
Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well It's almost equal to 1 out of 3 people enrolled in the period. Most people have heard of us via Instagram or Tiktok. Here it's only advertising we've done, so very fun to see that it works as expected. Maybe a little surprising is how good Tickok actually worked for us (and yes. We've checked, the reported ones here have at least the same quality as the other channels.
The fact that 15% of the people enrolled come from recommendations from friends and colleagues is also fun. And that's something we see often too. It is a good idea to have an application from a company and a few weeks later it will be sent 2-5 applications from the same company. We take that as a sign that quality is good enough!
Throughout the period we have been busy testing among others the best-functioning message and which channel gives us most of the messages At best. The results of several of these tests are also shared with the subscribers to the EFFEC.
Here are some examples of ads we have run:
Effect of the EFF
When we started the project, we decided not to evaluate the results until one year after the first time and keep going every one of the weeks. Here's some of what we've achieved for so long:
- 4400 market participants enrolled
- 52 editions sent (no breaks, even on holidays)
- E-commerce Day 2022: 4 tickets sold
- E-commerce Day 2023: 7 tickets sold (for now)
- An operational market assistant agreement to 55k per month
- Registrations for courses we have been course holders at
- Qualified applicants for jobs we called out in the newsletter
- Existing customers want to discuss what is being written about in the EFF
- More in INEVO are even more up-to-date on what is happening
- Review of EFFECT and INEVO in podcasts, blogs, newsletters and on social media
We do not have concrete targets for this, but we also know that the EFFECT has helped to raise the visibility of INEVO in the industry and that we are now among the suppliers who are being assessed in many more companies than before.
How much has EFFECT cost?
It takes money to make money. Newsletters are often considered free or almost free - but some costs are indeed!
Here you can see the costs we have had with EFFECT in the last year:
- Approximately 350k in labour costs (more if you include potential lost income)
- Approximately 100k in advertising
- About 15k Mailchimp license
- 4x tickets for E-commerce Day 2023
So we land on +/- 500,000 invested in the project.
Road on
As you have seen, there is a project that costs us a lot and requires a lot of energy. On the other hand, there has been one of the most motivational internal projects we've been running for a long time and we've managed to go to zero in the first year. In the internal sense, we believe that it can only go up from here. We still have steel faith in the project and are betting on it.
The biggest challenge this year two will be the same as this year one. Ensure we have good continuity and can send out every single week.
Markus Wachek Johnsen has been the one who has secured it for us in the whole of 2022. In summer, he goes to Portugal to take a master. That means we have to find a new person internally to take responsibility for the implementation and we are sure that we will. With well documented procedures, it must be done well.
The most exciting thing in 2023 is to experiment with new ways of spreading the happy message about the EFF. We have some interesting ideas about the vitality that we want to test out. More about how this works can be read in the EFFECT later this year.
If you're not already Subscribe to EFFECT you can do it here.