|
Brief
National Boat Shows is the show organising arm of the British Marine Federation (BMF).
Database Group Interactive (DbGi) has been the BMF’s long-term marketing database and email service provider, and works closely with BMF, its creative agency, and its ticketing partner in the promotion of these events.
This case study focuses particularly on the 2009 London International Boat Show (LIBS). Since the move to ExCeL, the LIBS has cemented its position as the London’s largest annual event.
Strategy
The email marketing program that was used to create awareness of the event allowed DbGi to demonstrate its competencies in no fewer than 5 different areas, namely:
• Data Management
• Subject Line Testing
• Personalised Creative
• Acquisition Data Sourcing
• Campaign ROI
Execution
Data Management DbGi hosts the BMF’s marketing database, and manages the campaign fulfillment that is required to promote the boat shows.
BMF has been aware as a marketer that email addresses age, a number of them become dormant, and should be excluded from future selections.
From a data hygiene perspective this represents best practice – some of the major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) actually penalize broadcast activity to dormant accounts in the form of blocking, black-listing, or volume throttling.
On a positive note, removing these addresses implicitly improves campaign responsiveness, while reducing broadcast costs. At the beginning of the LIBS 2009 campaign, the email address database was split into two cells – “Active” and “Inactive” – with the split criteria being applied on the basis of each address owner’s “recency heartbeat” flag as follows:
• Address owners who hadn’t opened an email during the previous 6 month period were placed into the “Inactive” data file.
• Address owners who had opened or clicked at least one email during the previous 6 month period were placed into the ‘Active’ data file.
• The split between active and inactive was approximately 50/50.
The “Inactive” file was then used to drive a re-activation campaign, with members being asked to indicate whether they would like to continue hearing about the BMF’s events (see below).
There was a take-up rate of approximately 10%, and these responders were then moved into the “Active” file, while the non-responders were then flagged to receive no further campaign activity.
The 2009 LIBS email campaign proceeded to generate average email open rates of 28.4%, compared with 19.3% for the comparable activity in 2008, a year-on-year uplift of 47%.
Subject Line Testing
As part of the re-activation campaign described above, the opportunity was taken to test the effectiveness of two different subject lines, with one being personalized and the other unpersonalised, as follows :
• “Dear [~title~] [~surname~], would you still like to hear from us?”
• “London International Boat Show – We’re Listening”
The open rates for the personalized subject line outperformed with the non-personalised subject line by 45%, demonstrating conclusively the positive effect that subject line personalization has on recipient recognition – a vital consideration in email marketing.
It can be seen that not only do open rates for personalized subject lines exceed those for non-personalised by almost 50%, but click-through rates, as well as the click-to-open ratio (a good indicator of recipient engagement) are also noticeably higher.
Graphic Personalisation
A significant percentage of the 2009 LIBS campaign made use of DbGi’s ePIC™ graphical personalization technology.
In this particular instance, the technology was used to embed the recipient’s name to appear as though it is part of the admission ticket.
This technique was first trialed as part of the 2008 LIBS campaign and generated open rates that were 16% than those for the 2007 LIBS campaign when compared on a like-forlike basis.
In 2009, ePIC™ was used for the bulk of the LIBS campaign, with open rates for the cells that used the technology being 20% higher than for the cells which did not make use of the technology.
This trend was replicated for click-through rates, which were also 20% higher on average for the ePIC™ cells. A particularly important statistic for BMF is that 33% of all click-through activity was in the form of ticket bookings, which had a direct positive outcome for campaign ROI.
Use of Acquisition Data
BMF also wanted to trial the use of rental data, to drive attendance from a potential audience outside of its existing marketing database. In order to ensure that this data was tailored to an audience that looked similar to existing LIBS attendees, some initial profiling work as carried out.
It made sense that the acquisition data should be sourced from all the six geographical areas in which almost two thirds of all LIBS attendees reside.
Furthermore, all members of the BMF marketing database for whom a PAF-validated post code is held, are tagged using Eurodirect’s Cameo UK database to provide a geodemographic, socio-economic, and lifestyle profile of the BMF members.
It can immediately be seen that almost two thirds of the total BMF marketing database fits within the top-4 Cameo groupings (codes 1, 2, 3 and 4).
This provides valuable insight when it comes to selecting acquisition data that implicitly contains the same attributes as the existing members.
Campaign results, in the form of distribution of click-through activity, was as follows:
• was obtained from individuals who could be classified as either “wealthy” or “prosperous”. This ties in closely with the customer insight outlined above.
• Not surprisingly, responsiveness varied as a function of age as well, with respondents aged 35+ representing 57% of the total selection but delivering 72% of the total responses.
• There was also a distinct gender bias, with 3 out of every 5 responses coming from the male component of the selection. These are actionable learning’s for BMF, which can be applied to future acquisition activity to deliver a quantifiable uplift to this element of BMF’s e-marketing program.
Results
DbGi is a strong advocate of “test-and-learn” programs that enable its clients to continually evolve and enhance their email marketing activity.
This principle is reflected by DbGi’s Pi Framework, an ongoing cycle that embraces the Planning, Preparation, Production, and Performance Analysis elements of email programs that delivers improvement through integration.
In the case of BMF, the combined effect of the activities that have been outlined in this document has been to deliver a year-on-year uplift of 20% in online bookings for the London International Boat Show.
Client Feedback
“Working with DbGi has enabled us to make a number of significant improvements to our email marketing program.”
“The combined effect of the smart data management, subject-line segmentation,
and creative personalization has enabled us to benefit where it really matters – in the form of additional online bookings. The ultimate benefit, of course, is an immediate and measurable improvement in our campaign ROI – always a good story to be able to take back to our campaign stakeholders”
“These learning’s are now being applied to the e-marketing program for the upcoming PSP Southampton Boat Show. For the first time, we are now making use of DbGi’s conversion tracking functionality to provide true closed-loop reporting of the value that can be directly assigned to the e-broadcasts, and we are confident of seeing even greater benefits as a result.”
Samantha Bryant, Product Manager – LIBS
|