In the third and final part of our conference round-up we discover how to be intelligent with email marketing and find out why social media can be more than just an engagement channel
Café Pod: Intelligent Email Marketing Drives a Fourfold Increase in Revenue in Six Months
Sadie Arnold, Email Marketing Manager at Genie Goals and Danielle Woolley, Customer Success Manager at Adestra
Getting your emails acted on can be quite a challenge, but email marketing can be a significant revenue driver. Timely, helpful and creative campaigns that provide useful content rather than just pushing your brand can lift engagement levels and generate conversions. But the key is to be intelligent: know what stage your brand is at and whether you have the data and information to make the campaign effective.
Café Pod teamed up with Warner Bros to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of American TV sitcom Friends, providing coffee to fans at promotional events and sponsoring a competition give-away for a trip to New York. The Café Pod branding was visible across the events and marketing materials. Genie Goals helped the brand create an effective email marketing campaign to convert competition entrants to customers. The competition entry form was plugged directly into Café Pod’s website with a form, meaning that the data could be captured for retargeting purposes later on. Completion of entry triggered an automated ‘Thank You’ email with immediate calls-to-action and an incentive to increase chances of conversion. This was followed up with another branded email after the prize draw. Genie Goals also worked with Café Pod’s Big Cup Little Cup sub-brand to improve their email marketing.
Key takeaways: make it easy and attractive for users to sign up to your emails, and be transparent in what they will receive from the exchange. Be creative if producing a ‘nursery programme’—make the content useful, relevant and imaginative. Every single customer base is different so you need to test everything you do. Never get complacent; the customer changes every day.
Transforming a Catalogue Business to Online Excellence in Retail
Ruud Verdellen, Associate Director at Stream:20
News UK acquired Handpicked Collection— a retail catalogue featuring home accessories, gadgets, jewellery and more, all selected by a panel of experts—in April 2014 after noticing an overlap in the brand’s audience and that of The Times. At this point, it was a business with little digital presence and, having decided to move sectors, had low KPIs. Ruud Verdellen at Stream:20 talked delegates through the process behind positioning Handpicked Collection as a scalable ecommerce company, using News UK’s existing audience to build the business.
Beginning with a full audit of the brand’s marketing activities, they identified 112 improvement opportunities across the business. In the two months between project sign-off and the Christmas catalogue drop, Stream:20 brought in new rebranding, PR and PPC agencies and coding developers, audited the brand’s database and customer profiles and overhauled the affiliate, CRM and email programmes. The ecommerce revenue and conversion rates increased significantly over the Christmas period.
Ruud’s key takeaways: support customers who are not ready to purchase with features like wish lists, ‘recently viewed’ tabs or personalised product recommendations. Create a sense of urgency within the basket. Be upfront about delivery and costs. Create confidence in the site’s security. Personalise basket abandonment emails and site overlays. And take a content-led approach: this will prompt more engagement and eventually generate sales.
Waterstones: From the Best High Street Bookshops to the Best Book Buying Experience, Full Stop
Emma Grinter, Senior Online Marketing Manager at Waterstones
When Waterstones was acquired from the HMV group in 2011, their marketing strategy shifted from highlighting cheap books and heavy discounting to becoming personalised and local. But while the business was adapting, the site wasn’t. Clunky and confusing, the website was “Like a leaky bucket, losing customers every step of the way,” Emma Grinter at Waterstones. The click-and-collect function, in particular, was an area of weakness. But the brand conducted some video research to understand the problem and highlight the need for change, filming six participants as they tried to navigate the click-and-collect option.
Using the findings, they adapted the website accordingly. They also used the knowledge that many customers identify a book by the colour or design on the book jacket, so made sure that the image of the book was large on the product pages. With 260 bookshops across the country, they made sure that each had their own local bookshop page, which were then handed over to the individual stores to manage. With a new customer-friendly website that extended the atmosphere of their physical stores, Waterstones have become the store that we know and love today.
How Notonthehighstreet.com has Established Social Media as a Viable Sales Channel
Ben Carter, Marketing Director and Fiona Wallin, Head of Marketing Communications at Notonthehighstreet.com
“Customers are increasingly hungry for something they can’t find elsewhere,” says Ben Carter at Notonthehighstreet.com. When they find unique products or ideas, they want to share them on social media. And this is why Notonthehighstreet.com is so successful on social. With customisable designs and no physical high street store to distribute to, the brand’s product range lends itself to in-the-moment marketing, and social media is the ideal platform to generate buzz around this. Because of the prominence of social marketing in Notonthehighstreet.com’s success (38 per cent of customers admitted having bought a product after engaging with it on Facebook), it’s become a viable sales channel for the brand.
The turning point of their social success came when the brand started automatically promoting content once it had tipped a virality point. They pushed out a picture of a novelty wine glass on a Friday afternoon and, by Monday morning, it had reached three million users, received 40,000 shares and 29,000 Likes and acquired 10,000 new fans. Most importantly, it generated record-breaking sales for the supplier. Their strategy began with fan acquisition, using lookalike targeting of organic fans to grow social following and auto-promoting content to them. They then kept them engaged with relevant content by tapping into social conversations, and using a blend of organic and paid promotion. Finally, they converted them to customers: using website custom audiences and tailored audiences on Twitter as well as a CRM database, and sending out different content depending on previous purchase history and behaviour.
Key takeaways: creative has a shelf-life, so make sure you’re refreshing it. Test and learn always. And find that sweet spot between reach and relevance.
By Estelle Hakner and Jon Fortgang.