The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is a global professional membership body driving excellence in architecture.
The Challenge
Teams across the organisation were working in silo, sending email communications to their own lists. There was no visibility of how many emails and what content subscribers were receiving. There was no consistency in branding and presentation, resulting in a poor and potentially confusing customer experience.
Processes were inefficient, with duplication of effort across teams. RIBA partnered with Adestra to streamline their communications and personalise content based on their customers’ preferences.
The Strategy
RIBA embarked on a project to centralise email communications and regain control of the customer experience. They worked with teams across the organisation to audit the emails they were sending and to whom. They also looked at what content was important and where the data was stored.
A strategy was developed to ensure that customers were receiving clear and relevant information in a consistent format. This included developing a preference centre to allow people to select their areas of interest at the point of sign-up.
RIBA’s eNews template was also redesigned so it aligned with the institute’s branding and colour scheme. It now works effectively across all platforms and delivers a consistent experience on the website.
With their new modular template solution, RIBA are able to use conditional content rules. This means that they can create a single email with differing content blocks, that are shown to the recipient according to their preferences.
Existing subscribers were invited to add preferences to their accounts with RIBA’s ‘update your preferences’ campaign.
The Results
The new email template and preference center has helped RIBA to optimise their data and become more time efficient. The team estimates that they have saved approximately 50 per cent of their workload.
The new preference centre has generated a significant number of membership leads for the organisation, by asking sign-ups whether they are interested in membership. Additionally, 25 per cent of their existing customers completed their preferences as a result of the ‘update your preferences’ campaign.
The open rate for RIBA eNews has increased from 26 per cent to 29 per cent, and the click rate from 3.7 per cent to 6.4 per cent, showing that the personalised content is generating more engagement.