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Brief
Wiltshire Farm Foods (WFF) is the UK’s leading meals delivery service. All meals are prepared in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, frozen the moment they are cooked, and then delivered across the UK & Northern Ireland through a network of local outlets.
Email marketing forms a key element of WFF’s customer communications strategy, and there is a clearly stated desire to maximise the responsiveness that the email broadcasts generate. For this reason, WFF was keen to trial Database Group Interactive’s ( DBGi ) ePIC™ graphical personalisation technology, where the personalisation forms part of the actual email creative.
Strategy
It was decided to use WFF’s pre-Christmas broadcast to conduct the test (2009). This is an important time for WFF, with the opportunity to generate significant ordering levels in advance of the festive season.
There were several creative alternatives under consideration. Because WFF has an active Facebook community, the choice was put to a vote ( “Tell us which creative would make the best Christmas greeting” ), but with no hint of the personalisation to come.
One important consideration when running an ePIC™ campaign is to ensure that the name being used for the personalisation is correct. Because it is being made so visible, there is a greater consequent implication if the name is incorrect. For this reason, DBGi validates all the forenames that are to be used against its “known names” lexicon. Those names that returned a 100% confidence of being correct were placed in the “personalised” cell, while those that didn’t were placed into a “static” cell – important for control purposes.
The email was then subjected to a test broadcast to all major UK ISPs to ensure that inbox delivery was being obtained. With a clean bill of health, the campaign was then ready for live broadcast.
Execution
The broadcast was sent out on the 13th December. Because it was a brand new list for DBGi, the list was allocated to a pre-warmed IP address, and the broadcast itself was carefully throttled. As a result, inbox delivery rates were maximised.
Results
The headline numbers from the broadcast included :
- The open rates for the personalised cell were 30% greater than for the un-personalised cell.
- Total opens per recipient were also 10% higher for the personalised cell – an excellent indicator of engagement on the part of the recipients.
- In fact, 25 of the recipients were so impressed that they viewed the email 15 or more times !
- There were also interesting learnings in terms of most responsive domains – BT/Yahoo and Talktalk/Tiscali both generated response rates that were over 50% higher than the WFF benchmark.
One of the reasons that ePIC™ has been so successful is because of the increasing use of the preview pane as a decision criterion on whether to open the email or not. While it’s long been a factor when sending mail to the corporate world, more than 50% of consumers are now using a preview pane for their home mail as well. The fact that ePIC™ makes the email so visually striking means that when the personalisation is glimpsed through the preview pane, it then acts as a very powerful call to action to actually open the email to see what it contains.
This success is reflected by Matt Curry, Head of New Media for WFF, who commented “At Wiltshire Farm Foods, we strive to deliver a personalised service to our customers - and so we’re always looking for ways to extend this personalisation online. The DBGi Christmas Card was an innovative, fun & highly rewarding campaign for us. We enjoyed a dramatic increase in sales from it at a critical time of the year, and more importantly our customers loved it too!”
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