Creativity in a box - rules and templates for email

The client
Terrapinn is a global business media company and a leading organiser of trade exhibitions, conferences and training solutions, as well as electronic and print publications.

The challenge
Email is vital to Terrapinn's business. The company sends thousands a week, from mass mailings to potential conference delegates, to small, discrete sends to groups such as potential speakers. Its event and product offering is large and diverse, and had spawned a range of email styles of varying quality. Emails are created and managed in-house by highly motivated teams, but these teams had a tendency to exhaust the database by sending too much, too often.

From this…

Before CDA became involved emails used haphazard styles and composition

What CDA did
We began working with Terrapinn late last year as the company embarked on a major overhaul of its database management system - which included the introduction of a new email platform. The aim was to give Terrapinn's people more detailed control over their data - customers, prospects, segments defined by job title or geographic location… and a more focused approach to communicating with these audiences.

CDA was asked to devise an online communication strategy that started with a radical rethink of how email was used within Terrapinn. The first step was the creation of a suite of email templates that unified the Terrapinn brand, allowed individual branded events to breathe and expand, and which were easy for the event teams to use within the new email system.

To this…

Specifically designed templates coupled with training

The solution was content templates with all possible promo panels and buttons in 6 neutral colourways designed to work with any of the 350+ events Terrrapinn produces each year. The event teams access these on the email platform choosing the elements needed for each send "off the peg". This then allows them to concentrate on the quality of the content and message instead of the HTML.

We also developed a series of half-day training workshops for all Terrapinn event management teams focusing on email content creation and template usage. These concentrated on evolving an individual event's tone of voice within the Terrapinn brand and developing profitable relationships by sending relevant and useful information at the point of need.

Using these

This page from the style guide shows some of the headings, banners and buttons available

Finally, CDA wrote a special style guide: "A guide to talking turtle online - creating great event websites and emails", which pulls the whole project together.

This approach has now been extended to Terrapinn's event websites.

What Terrapinn says about us
"CDA really took the time to understand Terrapinn, what we do, what we wanted and who we are. This ensured that the end result was workable, professional and responsive. Terrapinn now has an email strategy that is truly world class."
Sharon Roessen, Marketing and e-business Director

What we learnt from the project
"CDA has evolved a detailed knowledge of how to communicate online and create effective emails that advantage mass media, while still creating one-to-one conversations with recipients. The most critical thing was to take this knowledge and then apply it to the very specific needs of Terrapinn in such a way that their own expertise and obvious creativity was not stifled but controlled and defined."
Clare O'Brien, CDA

Visit Terrapinn's website

Listen to Clare O’Brien’s Terrapinn Story presentation delivered at the launch of cScape’s Winners and Losers in a Troubled Economy in March 2008

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