2012 Bronze Best use of email marketing Bronze Automotive

Client Virgin Trains

How did the campaign make a difference? This campaign targeted marginal gains across every aspect of email effectiveness, to generate a big overall effect. Focus on creative impact, increasing open rates and message relevance (and making the emails more interesting) increased opens across all segments and overall by 33%. ROI increased from a rolling average of £35:1 to £56:1 in nine months.

What details of the strategy make this a winning entry? The GB cycling team's dominance over their competitors during London 2012 provides an interesting parallel to describe the Virgin Trains email marketing approach. David Brailsford, GB Cycling’s performance director, attributed their success to a single-minded goal and “an aggregation of marginal gains”. The same two factors led to this campaign’s success. The previous year had provided impressive email performance growth, after fundamental changes to the design template, mobile accessibility and content. A new evaluation process reported on performance in fine detail every month. New insights had driven ROI up steadily. Continued growth was vital as Virgin Trains was finalising its franchise bid and needed to justify future revenue forecasts. This year it needed to increase financial KPIs further, focusing single-mindedly on ROI. The search for marginal gains focused on intense analysis and testing, studying every aspect of email performance and building on last year’s learnings. Research showed that it was important to deliver value in every email.

How did creativity bring the strategy to life? Boredom kills response; open rates had been slipping gradually. It was decided to drop the idea of a newsletter and inject variety to maintain interest, while building reader’s expectation that “there’ll be something of value in it for me”, with new ways to deliver value, such as ‘Great Late Deals’, ‘£10 off your next booking’ and competition emails. The template was stripped back, enabling greater creative freedom to help grab attention, especially in the response-driving preview pane area. Key engagement devices were standardised. Rather than aiming for clicks in every email, focus moved to segment-targeted purchase response-drivers. A two-touch approach maximised return on creative investment for very little extra cost.

Results By October, the overall open rate had climbed from a norm of around 15% to a new level of about 20%. ROI was the ultimate goal: the rise from an average of £35:1 up to a three-month average of £56:1 by May 2012 shows the new creative impact. The incremental profit contribution from a database of 750,000 increased by over £2m.

Team Paul Becque, John Treacy, Tom Duckham, Rosalind Mair, Andrew Wills, Scott Hunter, Mat Prime, Taylor Westoby, Matt Daymond, Dan Noller

Other contributors CreatorMail – Email management, The Trainline – Database management and response analysis