2015 Silver Best Use of Email Marketing

Proximity London

MoneySuperMarket

An EPIC reactivation

The Team
Steve Sweeney, Jillian Courtney, Alex Buchanan-Dunlop, Neil Williamson, Sarah Blackman, Claire Aldous, Nick Rainbow, Kirsten Sluggett, John Treacy, Durrelle Gregory, Luke McClure, Toyin Etiko,
Jamie Whittle, Jonathan Bahar

Contributors
Salesforce.com / Return Path - Email Deployment & Deliverability/IP Management

Campaign overview

MoneySuperMarket is committed to helping customers save money on household bills. The trouble is, its customers were too busy doing other things, with over 74% disengaging from the brand’s emails, on which it is almost entirely reliant for outgoing communications, in the first three months of being acquired.

This campaign set out to get them back, targeting 1.8 million previous customers who had lapsed over the preceding six months to four years.

In a move away from business-as-usual work, the team created three epic-looking, animated emails that reactivated hundreds of thousands of MoneySuperMarket customers – delivering six-figure revenues.

Strategy

The strategy needed to reignite customers’ money-saving hunger with honesty, simplicity and the application of a key insight.

Being honest about this audience, only 16% had ever bought through MoneySuperMarket and most data was over two years old: most were effectively cold leads.

This also demanded a simple approach. The campaign had to communicate its core message in less than three seconds, with a contact strategy designed to pull different emotional levers to encourage people to act.

And the key insight was that if anything can motivate people, it’s knowing that ‘Dave’ next door is getting a better deal. Home Bill Checker is one of the simplest tools MoneySuperMarket offers, and allows people to see what others are paying for their home insurance, energy and broadband just by entering their postcode.

Creativity

The creative stood out, from the attitude of the subject line to the call to action. It brought out customers’ competitive money-saving spirit, leveraging neighbour envy in a positive way.

Visually, each email looked different, but always simple, drawing the reader with subtle animation towards the call to action. Three creative executions did just this. ‘Button’ disrupted and re-awakened lapsed audiences with the simplest email ever: a big button. ‘Borrow a Bentley’ gave lapsed motor insurance enquirers the chance to outdo their neighbours with some fancy wheels. And ‘Epic Fail’ took responsibility for the brand not being able to engage the customer and, as a last chance to get back into money-saving, gave them a way to save money every day with a free tastecard.

The team also tested a disruptive video version to see which resonated most.

Results

With such a lapsed audience, half of whom had never engaged with email, deliverability issues and complaints were expected.

But through a simple, entertaining approach, people’s attention was captured, with bounce rates kept at 2.7%, unsubscribes a tiny 0.11% and the highest open rate an impressive 24% for Epic Fail (and from a 3-4 year lapsed list).

MoneySuperMarket’s database was cleansed of 130,000 non-marketable customers while 400,000 more were re-activated. The campaign drew more than 9,000 incremental sales and six-figure revenue gains – giving an impressive 12:1 ROMI.

Overall, the campaign has given the brand a wealth of data to hone its current contact strategy and inform its early lapse programme, while also delivering a swathe of effectively customers back into its CRM programme.