July 23, 2015

Evans Cycles

Adestra Ltd tell us how they helped Evans Cycles achieve a 50 per cent uplift in sales thanks to an automated email campaign.

The Strategy

Evans Cycles targeted contacts that had previously expressed interest in their emails, but hadn’t purchased a bicycle from them in the past year, offering great deals on clearance bicycles.

The foundation of their list was customers who hadn’t purchased a bicycle from Evans Cycles in the last 12 months. This data was sourced from their single customer view database via integration with more2, Evans Cycles’ marketing database provider, encompassing both online and offline purchase history.

They further refined it with MessageFocus segmentation, based on open rates, to ensure that the message was sent to engaged subscribers: those who had opened an email in the past 60 days. The graphics-heavy design in the email highlighted popular cycle models, showed the significant savings for consumers, and gave a clear incentive to buy now.

Giving subscribers a related reason to click, in addition to your primary offer, is another great way to increase conversions. Evans Cycles did this by highlighting their most popular bike brand at the top, and including a secondary section in their email for purchasing other clearance bikes. This attracted more subscribers to their website, and significantly increased conversions compared to previous emails sent to lists of a similar size.

The Results

With an open rate of 37 per cent and a click rate of 8.3 per cent, this campaign demonstrates the power of pairing email engagement data with purchase history data. The time-sensitive nature of the clearance offer within the subject line, and the additional offer content within the email, combined to encourage recipients to click-through. Importantly, the offer inspired more website visitors than ever to purchase.

In fact, overall purchases generated 50 per cent more in total revenue compared to other, similar campaigns.

Link performance for this email identified that the primary banner for the clearance of Scott bikes was almost tied for equal performance with the secondary banner for Evans Cycles’ entire selection of clearance bikes (each drawing 25 per cent and 26 per cent of links, respectively). It gets more impressive when you remember the secondary link was well ‘below the fold.’ This clearly demonstrates that delivering a tailored message, to a segmented list of subscribers based on purchase and email engagement data, can result in a significant uptake in purchases.