Case Study: IBM "Flashes Up" eNewsletter

Of course, IQ Television did a lot more for ForwardView than just Flash up IBM content with interactivity, animation, and video. The agency also took over the hosting of the newsletter so it could take advantage of IQ Television's Showmail email system. Showmail includes a content management system for email, a content customization engine, and a comprehensive tracking and data collection engine. In many ways, what Showmail has done for IBM's newsletter is more important than what Flash has done for the newsletter.

Quin believes that the secret to successful online marketing is to make the content relevant to the viewer. To that end, Showmail employs a questionnaire that gathers user profiles and preferences, allowing them to tailor the content to suit the industry and interests of the viewer. ForwardView is actually sent out in five slightly different versions, customized on the fly, based on the user's profile.

"The really nice thing about Showmail is it throws off tons of metrics," says Quin. "We can be constantly monitoring ForwardView’s performance."

In fact, during the pilot stage of the ForwardView project, site visitors were offered their choice of the HTML version or the Flash version of ForwardView. Showmail's tracking capabilities allowed IBM to compare the two versions head-to-head. It soon became apparent that the Flash version was clearly outperforming the text version. Clickthroughs showed that while HTML/text response was 1.5 percent, Showmail response was nearly 5 percent. Also, while average time spent viewing the HTML version was only about 1-2 minutes, average time viewing the Flash/Showmail version was more than 4 minutes. A survey showed that 92 percent of people "liked the multimedia experience." And best of all, one in five new viewers exposed to the Flashed-up version signed up to be a regular subscriber.

Eventually, IBM decided to drop its HTML-only format in favor of the Showmail version as the exclusive vehicle for the ForwardView newsletter. That doesn't mean, however, that it dropped the text versions of its features altogether. The text articles are still available to viewers who click on "For More Information" links and to dial up users who don‘t have enough bandwidth to comfortably receive the Flash versions.

While IBM hasn't formally calculated ROI for its ForwardView upgrade project, it is looking closely at sales figures tied to the newsletter, something easily done thanks to Showmail's robust tracking capabilities. IBM can see which users click through from ForwardView to the IBM Web portal to buy from the online store there, and they can trace back to see which stories motivated viewers to buy. Showmail can, in fact, record every click the user makes.

Reiser and her team at IBM small and medium business were so pleased by the ForwardView pilot project that they recently decided to take ForwardView another step forward. In September, IQ Television revamped the newsletter, based on feedback obtained over the last year. Quin describes the revamp as a "redesign that creates an even more TV-like experience," while Reiser describes the revamp as an "enhancement" that has "cleaned up the user experience, made it more navigable, and added more user control."

Again, as before, IBM and IQ are pleased with the metrics they've gotten from this latest iteration of ForwardView. Since the September enhancements, clickthroughs have increased 78 percent among non subscribers (eConsents), while subscriber clickthroughs have increased by 97 percent.

IBM’s Leslie Reiser is pleased with the new and improved ForwardView because it has made her job easier. As manager of relationship marketing, her primary directive is to build customer relationships, and she thinks ForwardView has become an important tool toward that end. She believes that multimedia approach has not only made the newsletter look better, but she also believes that: "Flash (and rich media in general) enables the sort of interactive relationships and online dealing that no other medium can provide," she says. "The two-way exchange of information builds relationships," she adds.

And a pleased Tony Quin is now pointing to ForwardView as a model for what other companies can do with their Web-based content. He believes that the new "Flashed-up" ForwardView represents the future of the Web. "The Web started out based on text only because of the bandwidth limitations," says Quin. "If the Web was created today, with today's broadband already in place, the Web would be video-based. The analog would not be text; the analog would be TV."