Fill Your Pocket with Pocket Guides, 3 Emails and an Audience Google Form

OVERVIEW: When photographers are on the go, or in the field on an assignment, it’s not practical to carry a 200-300 page camera guide in their photography bags for reference. Most photographers tend to rely on their mobile phones for information, but there are times when even Google or Siri can’t be of much help. Enter the pocket guides. These compact, palm-sized books offer quick and easy instruction in a pinch. They have been a highly successful product since 2019, when Rocky Nook first experimented by publishing them. Since then, 25 of these pocket guides have been published on various camera models and photography topics.

WHO: Just as there are multiple competing automobile manufacturers, there are as many camera manufacturers: Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, Olympus, PENTAX, Sony, etc. For as many brands, there are equally as many camera models, and as many customers who faithfully support one brand over the others. In strategizing which camera makes and models to publish pocket guides on, Rocky Nook closely considers and researches the market to ascertain what cameras photographers are most using. Canon and Nikon are market leaders, followed by Sony and Olympus. This campaign was geared heavily toward Canon and Nikon users, however, it included pocket guides from all camera brands to appeal to a wider audience.

WHAT: My goals for this campaign were three-fold from the business perspective of creating sales opportunities and the community perspective of engaging audience. I wanted to highlight the breadth of what Rocky Nook has published thus far within the category of pocket guides. I aimed to build hype around the new, as-of-yet unpublished pocket guides by using a brand new CTA of “Add to Customer Wishlist.” And lastly, I wanted to recognize room for expansion as well as encourage customer participation by posing a query about where Rocky Nook should next grow the pocket guide series.

WHY/HOW: Through constant interface with Rocky Nook’s online store and its customer profiles, I recognized the ‘add to wishlist’ website feature had been under-utilized from a marketing standpoint. Both this website function and the invitation for direct audience feedback had not been demonstrated before in marketing through eBlast or otherwise. So, it was exciting to decide upon my strategy.

Given the marketing trend that Rocky Nook’s campaigns increase in Open Rate from the 1st email to the 2nd, I tested adding a wishlist function to the email in the 2nd position. CTAs are only successful when an action is readily available for a customer to make at the time of the ask. This creates a challenge for how to build and retain customer excitement around newly announced books that aren’t yet available to order or pre-order. The “Add to Wishlist” CTA and the surrounding messaging I designed would inform customers about newly announced books, as well as ask customers to do something with the information for a later date (Add Product to Wishlist).

The final strategy for this campaign was another innovation and opened the forum to Rocky Nook customers for direct feedback. It is highly ineffective to elect books to publish without proper market research and supporting evidence of a book’s place in the market. Opening the channel for customers to provide direct feedback was another approach for Rocky Nook to gather market research and to grow the customer relationship.

RESULTS: The 3 emails’ results across a campaign run-time of seven days were an Average Open Rate of 35% (10,700 opens), and a CTR of 1% (310 unique clicks). The unique coupon, POCKET40, was used 54 times at Rocky Nook’s online store for a total of $1,663 in gross sales. The Google form received 32 form submissions.