Airship's Welcome Campaign Drives Visits to Revolution Bars Group PLC

The Client

Revolution Bars Group is a leading operator of premium bars with over 70 venues in the UK. Trading through Revolution Bars and Revolucion de Cuba brands, they have been a client of Airship for ten years and utilise our CRM and email marketing platform to store all customer data and broadcast segmented and targeted email communications.

The Challenge

Airship were tasked by Revolution Bars Group PLC to deliver an improved welcome journey to go out to all new customers who signed up to their database for the first time.

The welcome journey is critical as it drives engagement with your customers when they first sign-up with your brand. They are also critical in cleaning down any incorrect email addresses from the get-go, ensuring higher delivery rates for your campaigns because your IP address is seen as a cleaner by the ESP’s (email service providers).

Revolution’s welcome journey was failing to deliver the kind of engagement rates and consequent venue footfall that we and the client were looking for. Airship had to devise a way to increase the revenue generated across three campaigns:

1. Venue visits utilising a unique code for walk-ins
2. Venue visits through a pre-booking incentive
3. Awareness leading to sales of the Revolution Card

The statistics below are for the 90 day period from 1st June - 31st August 2017.

The Campaign

Airship put together a new four-stage welcome journey. We used a mixture of unique codes (with an offer to redeem in venue) and click for call back mechanics to generate warm leads to be followed up by Revolution’s sales teams at the individual site level.

The four stages are:

Welcome One - Welcome offer & Food Driver

The first welcome email contained a unique code offer for 50% off food, and is triggered at 10am the day following sign up. This email was then re-sent two days later to all of those who hadn’t opened the first email to drive up that initial engagement.

Welcome Two - Revolution Card Purchase Driver

The second welcome email came five days following sign up and encouraged those who weren’t already Revolution Card holders to sign up for a Revolution Card. Revolution Card holders can receive discounts and exclusive offers on Revolution Bars’ products.

Welcome Three - Party Driver

The third email came ten days following sign up and encouraged everyone except those who had already booked to book a party with a click for call back mechanic.

Welcome Four - Booking Driver

Twenty days following sign up, a free sharer or round of shots was offered for those who book, excluding those who had already booked, utilising Airships Suppression tools. Again we included a click for call back, which generates a warm lead for the Revolution sales teams at individual site levels.

Overall Results:

• For all the Welcome Journeys the overall engagement rate was 38% with an overall click rate of 17.47%.
• Delivery rates improved by 2% through the journeys, from 96.92% on the first broadcast through to 98.73% on the final send. This is particularly important as it shows the emails were cleaned as they went through the Journeys. The ESP’s (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo etc) score IP addresses on how clean they are.
• 440 hot leads were received by the sales teams.
• 64% of new data came from Purple WiFi.
• Split tests on personalisation for the first Journey revealed a 6% difference in read rates when the customer's first name was merged into the subject line.

Comparison to 2016

• Volume of collected data up 43%
• Delivery rate up 10%
• Open rate volume up 170%
• Open rate down 3%
• Clicks volume up 181%
• Click rate up 2%

WiFi Bouncebacks

At the same time, we introduced WiFi bounce backs, which are delivered to the customer while they are in the venue. They deliver immediate value for the customer and client and are useful in cleaning down bad email addresses from CRM.

Further Reading

Read more about Customers Journeys in our Email Marketing Tips blog