Email marketing case studies

Professional Choice Hair and Beauty

Professional Choice have been carrying out email marketing for a number of years in house, sending newsletters on a monthly basis. It was identified that their emails were not performing as well as they should.

Requirement

A need was identified within the business, both for commercial email marketing software and the services of an experienced digital marketing expert to plan, design and impliment successful email marketing campaigns.

The approach

Professional Choice are a wholesale hair and beauty supplier. The team felt like they needed a little bit of help to improve their performance as their understanding of email marketing is very limited. The team recruited Gemma from Green Opal Digital to help.

Delivery and unsubscribe rates

When looking at delivery rates we needed to think about why emails weren’t landing in contacts in boxes.

There are usually 2 reasons that emails don’t landing; inaccurate email lists and the spam score of the email sent.

Using the tools native to Email Blaster, such as List Ai, we were able to clean up the list quickly. Once an email had been created it was put through the spam checker. With this information Gemma could tweak the email until it was scoring highly.

The teams unsubscribe rates were well over unsubscribe benchmark levels. While cleaning the data in order to improve the delivery rates it was identified that the team had been historically sending to the list twice. Resulting in the poor unsubscribe rates.

Results

The delivery rates have gone from an average of 89% to an average of 98% we have even had 2 sends where the delivery rate was 100%

The unsubscribe rates have gone from 2.6% to less than 1% exactly where we need them to be.

Now that we have cleaned the email marketing database we are moving on to using the A/B testing tool within Email Blaster.

"I have used a number of email platforms, what I really like about Email Blaster is the support that has been provided during my time of getting to know the system. Having said that, it is also really easy to use - I think my favourite tool is the list cleaning tool (yes I am a geek and I have a favorite tool)."

Gemma Russo Green Opal Digital

Sir Henry Royce Memorial Foundation

About:

The Sir Henry Royce Memorial Foundation is the charitable 'wing' of the community of Rolls-Royce enthusiasts, mostly those who own or admire Rolls-Royce motor cars from 1907 to the present day.

Sir Henry Royce was, of course, the co-founder of Rolls-Royce. Its aims as a charity are to promote and support engineering education and career development in our schools and universities and also to cherish the legacy of Sir Henry by providing a secure home for archive and museum material, all of which requires regular funding through charitable support.

There are currently about 10,000 members of the Enthusiasts club, many of whom support the Foundation and like to receive information on its activities.

Requirement

The Foundation had several objectives in regularly communicating with the wider RR community; to invite charitable support, to keep the community informed of special events, to send regular newsletters and reports to full members of the Foundation. Communication had previously been postal and therefore ad-hoc. A common complaint by the trustees was the poor communication with the RR community.

The approach

Email Blaster UK were approached and asked by the Foundation how to address the needs for successful email marketing solution; to develop an email address list of individuals who had already provided an address and declared a willingness to receive emails - i.e. an opt-in, to create standard templates - for events, newsletters and to address special messages such as calls for charitable support, to manage a regular email campaign programme.

Email address

list The Foundation had an exclusive address list of several hundred and this needed building to a much larger number with the wider community of Rolls-Royce enthusiasts. Email address 'boxes' were added to all postal communications, a window was added to the website and enquiry forms with email address request handed out at events. As a result, a high quality address list of many thousands was generated. Adding a sign-up form to the website is under consideration. The Foundation commenced an email communication programme with a small number of addresses - several hundred, but as a result of the action plan, this was quickly increased to several thousand. Email blaster has worked great as a business email marketing solution.

Email content

Email Blaster's cBuilder was used to upload templates previously created by the Foundation and new templates added for specials and events using cBuilder's library of templates. The Foundation had little computing skills other than familiarity with normal office software and there was an element of concern about how demanding was the operation of complex software such as Email Blaster. But the user interface was found to be easy to operate and all of the functions; uploading an address list, creating a newsletter, selecting and sending, analysing results, was mastered very quickly.

Delivery performance

Even though the address list was of first class quality, problems occurred with some delivery failures due to fierce firewall settings or spam filter settings with some intended recipients. With this particular community, an albeit small number of failures was unacceptable.

Members of clubs and charities do complain readily (and vociferously) if they don't receive an expected newsletter. Delivery had to be 100%. In all truth this may not have been easy as there always may remain a small number of recipients who interfaced the internet via in-house firewalls that needed to be set to recognise the originator. But Email Blaster uses UK based servers and its own IP's and this was a great advantage over other systems. With the help of the Email Blaster UK's help team, these issues were quickly overcome.

The Analysis suite was found to be particularly useful in quantifying delivery and open performance and link-clicks to the Foundation web-site.

Results

Delivery rates of 100% are routinely achieved and there are very few complaints of non- delivery. Open rate, as expected was very high - well into the 90%'s plus - a result that many product marketing campaigners would die for.

The key outcome of regular email campaigns to market events was a marked increase in attendances and, as a result, income.