Our First Breakfast Seminar of 2019: Co-Op and IBC Excel at Personalization and Automation

3 minute read

Upland Admin

All success stories have their own customer journey to tell.

Welcoming delegates with fresh coffee and a plateful of hot bacon rolls never fails to get our guests chatting before the seminar kicks off. With marketers from different industries, it was great to understand their challenges as well as showcasing some of our client achievements over the past year.

The best of both worlds: offline-to-online acquisition

Central England Co-operative decided to overhaul their email marketing strategy and focus on what their customers really want, encouraging them to subscribe to content that benefits them.

Sam Bailey, Digital & UX Architect at Co-op, described feeling inspired from our EMEA Summit in October to offer real value to Co-op’s subscribers rather than opting for the team’s historical batch and blast method, offering weekly deals across the whole subscriber base.

Co-op’s key challenge was to transform shoppers into subscribers ensuring a long-term customer relationship across both offline and online bases. To achieve this, Co-op started with an in-store campaign offering customers the chance to win a draw of seven prizes. To lead customers online, the offer was handed out via a voucher with a URL directing them to the competition page. Incorporating this into their strategy was an effective way of drawing their customers in, achieving a 77% open rate across all giveaways.

Co-op have now transformed their email strategy. Using segmentation as a way of categorizing subscriber interests has provided value to their campaigns and continued to deliver results. Their next challenge will be tackling the Easter season and continuing to offer the right products for their customers.

Getting the numbers up (the right way)

When the time is ticking and there’s a couple of weeks left until your biggest event of the year takes off, it’s easy to lose focus on what content you are putting out there to draw your subscribers in.

Emily Redding, Assistant Marketing Manager at IBC (International Broadcasting Convention), recognized that maintaining clean data and having a strong, efficient automation journey was key to engaging the right audience, resulting in 58% of registrants coming from email marketing. Having previously accumulated data from different shows without a clear idea of their subscribers’ preferences, IBC had a big data clean out – removing half of their database in the process. Nonetheless, this proved a wise move and 16% of contacts re-engaged with their content (alongside an uplift of 25% in open rates).

IBC also revamped their email template and included kinetic elements such as a countdown timer to emphasize the urgency of upcoming events. As a result of their hard work, IBC, partnered with Adestra, were awarded for Best use of technology for marketing at an event at the Event Technology Awards 2018.

First-Person Marketing at its best

Our head of Customer Success Dani Woolley shared her top tips when working towards a First-Person Marketing strategy. Dani emphasized her key takeaways as:

• Understand your current situation
• Develop your vision
• Prioritize based on your commercial goals
• Get buy-in from your wider organization
• Get it live when it’s ready

As a marketer, it’s important to consider all the points above combined. Dani explained how our client, MyOptique, looked at all aspects of their email metrics to test and optimize effectively, while NSPCC developed an automation strategy to improve their supporter journey and drive revenue.

Exploring engaging case studies such as these proved how important it is to plan, strategize and focus on your objectives. Once you understand your subscriber’s needs, the results will come naturally.

Reliable products. Real results.

Every day, thousands of companies rely on Upland to get their jobs done simply and effectively. See how brands are putting Upland to work.

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