Luxury travel company Beachcomber worked with Adestra to turn their welcome email into a trackable series.
The Challenge
Beachcomber were aware of the importance of a welcome email to new subscribers. However, because they were sending this triggered email from their website, rather than through an email service provider, they didn’t have any visibility of their success. In addition, they wanted to test whether extending the welcome email into a series would result in more engagement with potential customers.
The Strategy
The strategy was to create three emails focusing on introducing the company, encouraging subscribers to explore different destinations and, finally, a sales-led message for particular hotels in their portfolio. This would be monitored in terms of campaign-level engagement rates and traffic coming back to the website.
Adestra’s Automation Program Builder was perfect for quickly putting together a welcome programme and giving Beachcomber the insight they were after. With the help of Adestra’s professional services team, Beachcomber embedded a newsletter signup form on their website that automatically fed the contact data into MessageFocus.
Then, the Beachcomber marketing team created the three-part welcome series using the Automation Program Builder. This is made up of five main steps:
1. A first email that thanks subscribers for signing up and introduces the business
2. A four-day delay
3. A second email that encourages subscribers to explore the destinations offered by Beachcombers
4. A one-week delay
5. A third email that is more sales-led than the previous ones, showcasing particular offers
The Results
Beachcomber now have more visibility into the performance of their welcome emails than ever before. These achieved impressive engagement levels and the marketing team has access to individual-level reporting on contacts that go through the programme (with a live counter of the number of contacts in each stage).
In terms of results, Beachcomber have seen an impressive 15 per cent increase in email-driven website traffic after expanding the welcome email to a series. The individual campaigns have also performed well above the typical results in their industry, with an average 46 per cent open rate and 34 per cent click-to-open rate.
This approach has given Beachcomber the opportunity to segment their audience based on the types of holiday destinations they show interest in. Their marketing team is now looking to personalise future communications based on behavioural data gathered during the welcome programme.