More results are in from the Jubilee weekend. Comms team member, Matt Harman, tells us what national events mean for email marketing.
Wasn’t the Jubilee bank holiday fantastic? The boats, the pageantry and the hours of seemingly endless rain!
So, with my e-mail marketing hat on, I was filled with glee at the prospect of another national event to tie in to a huge campaign. When the attention of the whole country is focused on a single event, it provides a rare opportunity for us to address all of our members simultaneously.
We’ve seen time and time again that when the weather takes a turn for the worse, engagement with the sites and other members increases. We have already noted previously that traffic to sites almost doubled over the Jubilee weekend and email communications fared equally as well.
With users inside sheltering from the rain, inboxes became the place to be. Subsequently, we saw a 53% increase in open rates, in comparison with our last record after the big promotional campaign that ran over Easter. This increase, alone, is impressive but in light of the huge increase in recipients since then, it suddenly becomes really quite astounding. Moreover, we saw a 125% increase in click rate and an 80% increase in revenue, in comparison from the results we saw at Easter.
However, it’s not just bad weather than can give engagement a boost. Creative targeting towards all things royal and some slick design work can be equally attributed to our Jubilee success. Our Easter promotion ran on a very similar programme (and on a similarly under-whelming rainy weekend) and produced some excellent results. The Jubilee weekend offer, however, blew all previous promotions out of the boat-strewn water thanks largely to the extreme targeting of the campaign, proving that hijacking a national event can be the beginnings of a perfect recipe for a successful marketing campaign.
And so we begin to look forward to the success of the next campaign for the next event to unite the nation. What will it be? Euro 2012? The Olympics? Christmas? Maybe a royal baby? That’d do the trick!