A travel publishing house Carta Blanca organized a photo contest on its Internet site in the frame of promoting interesting places in Poland. The contest’s aim was to encourage amateur photographers to add their most interesting pictures of Poland to a specially prepared contest gallery. The publishing house contacted fotosik.pl, the largest Polish free photo hosting website, and asked to prepare a mailing action in the data base of their users.

Because of limited budget for this promotional action, it was suggested to send information not to the whole data base, which now accounts for more than 360 thousand of registered users, but only to a selected group of people most interested in the contest.
How to determine which users of a photo website are most interested in such a contest? In this case, demographic targeting does not matter much.

The best idea seems to contact those, who have already added to the site photos, which potentially could take part in the contest. In fotosik.pl we created a tool, which makes it possible to easily select users according to the subject of the addend pictures.
We decided to send the mailing to the users who added photos to the website in the following categories:

Holidays: Mountains, Sea, Winter holidays, bike trips, sailing, exotic, diving, camps, sightseeing, pilgrimages, trips         

Landscapes and nature: deserts, mountains, sea, rivers, lakes, forests/ trees, gardens/ flowers, meadows, sun and sky, phenomena, night landscapes

Places: Schools/ universities, Beaches, city, the country, Houses/ flats, Airports/ railway stations, Commercial, Industrial, Monuments/ historical places, Company/ work, Bridges, Churches, Cemeteries, Skyscrapers/ buildings, Entertainment

Such a categorization selected a total of 22 200 e-mail addresses. As we could have expected, mailing brought about very good results.

• Almost 16% of users opened the message.
• The noted value of CTR was on the level of 7%.
• The website of the client was visited by about 1500 people.

Until then, mailing campaigns realized by fotosik.pl have been aimed at the whole data base of the website. The average number of message opening was at the level of several per cent (the best mailing so far achieved the result of 9%), and the average CTR amounted to about 0.5%.

Taking into consideration the experience of previous mailing campaigns, it could be assumed that if the publishing house decided to send the mailing to the whole data base, it would achieve a slightly better result with a considerable higher cost. Even if we assumed a higher CTR value, it seems that a real effect would be on the level of 2000 people, who would visit the Carta Blanca contest website. This means that thanks to the above described targeting, we achieved a similar effect that would have been achieved by sending the message to the whole data base, at the same time reducing the cost by 80%!

When planning a promotion campaign in the form of mailing, it is sometimes worth deciding to give fewer precise shots than to waste many bullets for a machine-gun series. The number of accurate shots in both cases may be comparable, and we can save a lot of ammunition.