As the official destination marketing organization for Greater Philadelphia, Visit Philadelphia aims to build our region’s image, drive day and overnight visitation, and boost the local economy.
Our email program is a key part of our marketing efforts, delivering actionable information about local attractions, restaurants, hotels and more to the inboxes of residents and potential visitors.
From a KPI perspective, the goal of our email program is to drive qualified traffic to key content on visitphilly.com. We measure the impact of each email by focusing on several stats, including click rate, total clicks and average clicks.
In addition, we work with Miles Media to monetize our emails through ads and sponsored content, so a secondary goal is to surface and promote our advertisers’ events, attractions and deals.
In late 2023, an internal audit of our email program showed declining KPIs across the board, leading to a complete revamp of our strategy and execution in 2024 to reverse the negative trends and increase traffic to visitphilly.com.
By late 2023, our consumer emails — sent to our entire subscriber list every two weeks — were not performing well compared to historical data. All of our KPIs showed declines year over year. In short: Our email strategy was no longer working.
An internal audit showed that our emails were too long, and many readers were not clicking links deeper in the emails — nor seeing and clicking on ads that appeared after four or five blocks of content.
Beginning in January 2024, we made two major changes to our consumer emails: We cut their length in half, and we doubled our send frequency from biweekly to weekly.
The new emails contain just three featured stories (as opposed to six) and are sent out four times per month, rather than two.
The shorter emails better align with readers’ attention spans and expectations, and they also surface ads more easily.
In addition, the weekly sends allow our team to be more nimble and surface content that may be more urgent or timely.
Our readers definiyely took notice of these changes. In 2024, all of the KPIs for our email program increased — some dramatically so. Our email program was delivering once again!
The numbers speak for themselves. Some of the major KPI improvements we saw after revamping our email strategy are listed below:
