|
Building Customer Loyalty with Emailvision
Hearst digital is the digital division of The National Magazine Company, one of the foremost luxury consumer magazine publishers in the UK. Launched in January 2007 Hearst digital reaches 1/3 of all women online, with 4 million unique users a month.
In order to more proactively interact with their audiences and drive page impressions on their websites, Hearst digital had a need for targeted email broadcasts, to contact their subscribed readers with regular email communications. The core objective for Hearst digital in their email marketing is to encourage and maintain reader loyalty within the busy and highly competitive online sphere. Email marketing is a powerful tool for Hearst digital, bringing readers back to the sites regularly and encouraging loyalty. They are able to push their most relevant and timely content out to readers through daily, weekly and fortnightly email campaigns.
Another major objective in their email marketing strategy is ultimately to increase traffic to their websites. Marketing Communications Manager Emma Epp explains, “With non-transactional websites, page impressions work as currency for us. We need to drive these impressions with our email marketing and at the same time commercialise our database by increasing the advertising on email newsletters. We then must provide results for our paid advertisers in terms of open, click rates and circulations.” In addition, they need to be able to interact more frequently and with more relevance to their readers, whilst simplifying and expediting the campaign set up processes.
Their incumbent email marketing solution was very complex in process and took a long time to build HTML. With limited internal resources to run these email programmes and becoming costly in email volumes, they began a tender process for a new solution provider in January 2007 shortly after their acquisition by NatMag. Emailvision’s Campaign CommanderTM solution was able to meet all the objectives set out by Hearst digital, demonstrating a user-friendly interface, minimal set up procedure and easy to use processes.
Following their selection, Emailvision provided user training sessions with Hearst digital’s marketing team, and data sync set up to ensure they were up and running for creative template set up. Since beginning the partnership with Emailvision, Hearst digital now sends 16 weekly newsletters, across 5 website brands through Campaign CommanderTM.
Campaigns are now set up with great ease, utilising newsletter templates they’ve pre-created. Creating targeted email broadcasts by segmenting their database, Hearst digital are able to effortlessly interact with their audiences more proactively. When readers subscribe from the various websites, they are automatically added to the relevant list within Campaign CommanderTM and then begin receiving weekly email newsletters with up to the minute news, views and exclusive content. Hearst digital utilise various levels of personalisation within email campaigns, from simply addressing readers with ‘first name’ in a newsletter, to including individual website login details in service announcements.
With certain ‘themed’ campaigns throughout the year, they take advantage of the reflex functionality in Campaign CommanderTM to automate a series of emails. The ‘Summer Fashion’ Series, newsletters with a succession of advice, trends and promotions for seasonal women’s fashion, was created as a reflex campaign – allowing the marketing team to automate the sequence broadcasts, and in quicker succession to those who opened and clicked through. The Marketing team is targeted on their list size as a measure of ROI within their online marketing. They continually build their lists through website subscriptions, registration offers and have recently tested the ‘Forward to a Friend’ functionality within Campaign CommanderTM. Since inception of their relationship with Emailvision, Hearst digital has increased their list circulation from 142,000 to now well over 500,000. With the reporting functionality, they can provide paid advertisers with specific cost per click ROI data should they require it, with the ability to easily view open and click through rates on specific campaigns and advertisements. This information is also a valuable tool for negotiations with potential advertisers, to show real time and recent campaign reporting statistics to encourage their involvement.
In the near future Hearst digital are keen to take advantage of the split testing module in Campaign CommanderTM, to allow them to test different creative layouts, subject lines or sender variables to measure the best response rates this will inevitably provide higher ROI for their advertisers.
“Ease-of-use is a major factor for me when using Campaign CommanderTM – in such a busy department, we’ve saved time from a previously lengthy set up process to now using an intuitive system to get our campaigns launched to tight deadlines. Throughout the setup and the months of using Campaign CommanderTM, the support team at Emailvision have been great, both our account management team plus the data team when we had internal issues at the beginning. We’re delighted at how our email marketing has improved, and are really happy with our ongoing partnership,” comments Emma Epp, Marketing Communications Manager.
|