MarketingSherpa Honors RainToday.com with Gold Email Marketing Award

The One Piece of Advice You Can’t Generate Leads Without Receives Gold B2B Award for Best Email Opt-in Campaign

Miami, FL, March 5, 2008-
At MarketingSherpa's 3rd Annual Email Summit award ceremony held February 26, RainToday.com was presented with Gold B2B Award in the Best Email Opt-in Campaign category for The One Piece of Advice You Can’t Generate Leads Without. The awards were given by Eric Stockton, President, MarketingSherpa, and Joel Book, Director, ExactTarget.

 "A big congratulations to all the winners! This year's Email Marketing Awards recognized campaigns with well thought out strategies, effective implementation and outstanding results," said Jeanne Hopkins, Chief Marketing Officer, MECLABS Group. "This year's contest was highly competitive. We received over 300 high quality entries, more than twice the number of last year's."

RainToday.com's winning campaign was constructed around a special report, co-written by 10 experts in B2B lead generation titled, The One Piece of Advice You Can't Generate Leads Without, From 10 Experts on B2B Lead Generation. The report includes one article by 10 well-known experts stating the most important thing they think professionals across industries need to know to generate new leads.

The goal of RainToday.com's report was to generate new subscribers for the weekly newsletter, Rainmaker Report, while providing an interesting, useful, compelling set of advice from experts in B2B marketing and to act as a viral marketing piece for all parties involved.

RainToday.com evaluated and chose the contributing authors based on 1) their expertise on this topic, and 2) their marketing reach (newsletter, blog, web traffic, etc.). As authors were asked to contribute they were informed that they would be responsible for helping market the report through their distribution vehicles. Contributing experts include:

• Jill Konrath, Author of "Selling to Big Companies" (has a popular newsletter and blog)
• Brian Carroll, In Touch and Author of "Lead Generation for the Complex Sale" (very well known in this area and has one of the most highly read blogs on this topic out there)
• Stefan Tornquist and Sean Donahue, MarketingSherpa (industry leading publication with large newsletter list)
• Suzanne Lowe, Expertise Marketing and Author of "Marketplace Masters" (well known in professional services marketing and has a widely read newsletter and blog)
• Laura Ramos, Forrester Research (Laura is a leading contributor to Forrester's Marketing Blog)
• Larry Bodine, Law Marketing Portal (widely read website, blog, and newsletter by law firms)
• Ardath Albee, Marketing Interactions (newsletter and blog)
• Roy Young and Ann Handley, MarketingProfs (industry leading newsletter and blog with very large reach)
• Mike Schultz, RainToday.com and Wellesley Hills Group (widely read newsletter and blog)
• M.H. (Mac) McIntosh, The B2B Sales Lead Experts (well known expert in this area with newsletter and blog)

RainToday.com controlled the download of the special report requiring all authors and marketing partners to link to their landing page (http://www.raintoday.com/leadgenadvice.cfm). To access the report, all interested parties must complete a barrier form providing their email address along with the option to sign up for the Rainmaker Report newsletter.

In addition, RainToday.com negotiated a co-registration partnership with an industry leading publication that included exclusive rights for this publication to include a check box on the landing page, in exchange for a certain ratio of co-registrations from the partner’s site.

"We constructed this campaign to increase the number of opt-in subscribers to our weekly newsletter, Rainmaker Report and to act as a viral marketing piece for all involved," said Erica Stritch, General Manager of RainToday.com. "We took a topic that we know is 'hot' - lead generation - and used the combined marketing power of 10 experts in this field to help us achieve our goals. I would like to thank all of the contributing authors and marketing partners who helped create and spread the word about this report. The "Gold" belongs to all of us."

When all is said and done RainToday.com will generate more than 10,000 new subscribers through direct downloads and coregistration from this opt-in campaign.

About RainToday.com
RainToday.com is the premier online source for insight, advice, and tools for service business rainmakers, marketers and leaders. Based in Framingham, Massachusetts, RainToday.com features the most up-to-date resources including articles by industry experts, how-to guides and tools, sales and marketing research reports, webinars and events, and a free weekly newsletter, Rainmaker Report. For more information on RainToday.com, visit http://www.raintoday.com. RainToday is a part of Wellesley Hills Group (http://www.whillsgroup.com), a marketing and sales consulting firm helping professional services firms to grow.

Contact for RainToday.com
Erica Stritch
estritch@raintoday.com
508-405-0438

About MarketingSherpa
MarketingSherpa (http://www.marketingsherpa.com) is a research firm publishing practical case studies and benchmark guides for its community of marketers and thousands of weekly case study readers. Topics covered include practical how-to and exclusive data and proven tactics in business-to-business marketing, ecommerce marketing, email marketing, search marketing, telemarketing, media relations, landing page design, marketing measurement and online subscription marketing. The firm also operates six annual Summits attended by thousands of marketers. MarketingSherpa, along with MarketingExperiments and InTouch, is part of the MECLABS Group.