New mobile-responsive modular template delivers 500% increase in click-through rate for Future Publishing.
Future Plc is an international publishing and media group, and a leading digital business. Founded in 1985 with one magazine, today they have operations in the UK, US and Australia creating over 200 print publications, apps, websites and events. Their focus is in the core areas of consumer technology, games, entertainment, music and photography.
The Challenge
Create a mobile responsive template that will
- Deliver instantly recognizable branding and work for multiple types of content
- Increase engagement
- Streamline the campaign creation process
Adestra’s Digital Design team were engaged by Future to create a template to use initially during the lifecycle of the PC Gamer Weekender event. It needed to be instantly recognizable from a brand point of view, but also be engaging and stand out in the crowd so that it would boost ticket sales and excitement in equal measure. The template needed to be flexible enough to deal with the different types of content, yet easy to use by anyone – not just users with experience using HTML.
The Strategy
To achieve this, the new Adestra Email Editor was used, which allows for layout modules to be designed, coded and tested and then be re-arranged, repeated and edited by a marketer or content administrator; worry-free of display issues in any email clients. The template was designed to be fully responsive across all modern devices including iPhone, Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry.
Notable design features include the use of background images. These were extended beyond the 600px confines of a standard email to give them a greater impact (for clients such as Outlook where use of background images is restricted, these are automatically scaled back).
The Results
The Future team have a modular, scalable, attractive and robust template. Due to its success, the template has been re-purposed for use across a number of different brands and campaign types. This was achieved simply by changing the background colors and images, and with the addition of two new modules.
A fantastic benefit of the new templates is that campaign creation time has been dramatically reduced. Marketers are able to provide a clearer brief to the content team with specific word counts and image requirements, improving the workflow. The final campaign build in MessageFocus can take as little as 10 minutes.
10 minute campaign creation
500% increase in click-through rates
How has the campaign performance been affected?
We compared 4 ecommerce campaigns using the new templates with 4 previous ecommerce campaigns using the old template. There was a massive 500% increase in average click-through rate showing that the new mobile responsive template is making a huge impact on engagement. This followed through to conversions, with the new template campaigns showing an uplift in revenue.
Looking at Heatmap Reports for campaigns using the new template, Future have been pleased to see that click activity is sustained all the way down the email, with most activity on the main CTA.
About Adestra
We have been empowering clients to maximize marketing ROI through email-driven technology for over 10 years. Our flexible account structure and obsession with customer success have gained the trust of global and growing brands alike. Founded on the principle that marketing success takes more than technology, we’re not just Software as a Service, we’re Software AND a Service.
What next?
Future now plan to roll out the template across even more of their brands.