Situation Analysis
Marshall Communications has been working with the Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce (BHCC) for several years to position Bar Harbor as a must-see destination that offers visitors more than a vacation—a connection to the community and the natural resources surrounding it that motivates them to visit again and again.
In 2017, Marshall Communications worked closely with BHCC to rebrand and improve their monthly visitor e-newsletter. It was critical to refresh the newsletter with engaging content that promotes the region as a place to visit and as a service that presents new ideas and newsworthy information specific to visitors.
The target audience for the newsletter is past and potential visitors.
Objectives
- Position Bar Harbor as a must-see destination
- Keep Bar Harbor top of mind to visitors through a refreshed monthly e-newsletter
- Raise awareness of the refreshed e-newsletter by increasing readership
- Increase overall engagement by adding a poll feature to increase the click rate
Methods
Refresh: We branded the e-newsletter as ‘It all starts with a visit…’ and created a new template that presents as clean and fresh with new content categories.- Research: We researched which articles from the website tended to be most popular and featured that content in the e-newsletter. As part of the research, we benchmarked their readership statistics and click-rate stats from the month prior to the e-newsletter improvements.
- Better photography: With an increased focus of providing more engaging content that resonates with the target audiences and community, Marshall Communications worked closely with the chamber for relevant photos and story ideas.
- Introduce a poll feature: To increase engagement, Marshall Communications used the poll feature provided by Constant Contact to raise awareness of newsworthy events and to ask visitors what excites them about visiting Bar Harbor.
- Promote social media: In addition to including the social media icons in the newsletter, we also created e-newsletter-specific posts to raise awareness to new visitors.
Results
- Presented Bar Harbor as a must-see destination in monthly newsletter.
- Kept Bar Harbor top of mind by creating a new e-newsletter template to target visitors.
- Published the new e-newsletter in August 2017 with an increased open rate of 7.6% .
- Added a poll feature to increase engagement in March 2018. The poll increased the click rate by 9.3%.
