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.