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URL: http://www.cafedirect.co.uk/index.cfm
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Key Industries:
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Agricultural
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Charities
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Drink
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Food
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Government / Social / Political
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Household Goods
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Internet
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Retail
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Travel
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Key Sectors:
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CRM
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Design & Build
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e-mail marketing
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Cafédirect
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Cafédirect are the UK’s largest fair-trade hot drinks company. They currently work with 39 grower organisations from 13 countries, buying coffee direct from disadvantaged farmers in developing countries.
A monthly email newsletter plays a key role in helping to build a community of followers that ultimately help Cafédirect make a difference to farmers all over the world.
Brief/Strategy
The existing monthly e-newsletter template was created by replicating the layout of the website. While an excellent website it was not optimised for email, which resulted in a variety of problems. These included an enifficient layout that hid most of the calls-to-action ‘below the fold’ and used a large amount of unnecessary white space. The content itself was particularly difficult to read as it was text heavy and to the casual reader not obvious where articles started and finised.
In addition the HTML used was not compliant with all major email clients, with items such as background images not rendering correctly.
Execution
The Emailcenter client services team built a new email template making it easier to read and identify the call-to-actions.
When designing an email template it should be taken into account that recipients will not initially read an email word for word but will scan the message for content of interest and relevance. Therefore Emailcenter gave each article its own background colour, created a linked menu from the top of the page and added clear call to actions and headlines to every single article to aid ‘scanability.’
A new editing solution was also deployed that enabled stricter control over which sections of the email can be edited. This reduced human error and also removed any rendering issues at the major email clients by ensuring important HTML code was not changed.
Additional interactive sections such as a reader’s poll were introduced to help increase the engagement and dialogue with followers and Cafédirect, which is ultimately the major objective of the e-newsletter.
Results
Immediate improvements were seen as average click-thru rates increased by 32%. In addition a survey of recipients showed that over 75% of subscribers preferred the new style newsletter.
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