Using emails as eTickets proves advantageous for RCM Annual Midwifery Awards attendees

Brand: Redactive on behalf of The Royal College of Midwives

Campaign creation by: Fay Rayner

Website:https://redactive.co.uk/

Campaign details

Subject line: Your ticket to RCM Annual Midwifery Awards 2018

Opens: 53%

Clicks-of-opens: 52%

Context

Previously, attendees were sent printed tickets prior to the event and, on arrival, were presented with a card with their name and table number. This caused great confusion among the attendees, as the cards looked like badges but with no fastening.

What data was used?

Contacts registered to attend the RCM Annual Midwifery Awards.

Objectives

• Reduce costs and waste associated with printed tickets.
• Use a more convenient and feasible option for attendees to have all the information needed and present their ticket at the door.
• Improve attendee experience and speed up the entry process.
• To modernise the process, re-educating attendees and future proofing the experience.
• To track delivery and responses.

What makes this a performing campaign?

Based on previous experience Redactive decided to use emails as eTickets. Attendees could show the email on their mobile screen at the door to enter the RCM Annual Midwifery Awards. The email itself maintains the excitement of a print ticket with an envelope .gif, and has personalized fields that pull in the table and number of tickets reserved for each contact, not simply their name.

In addition to the brilliant dynamic design, Redactive have demonstrated great strategic perspective. They use a lot of the key elements of successful email marketing communications, such as personalization, brilliant design and planning.

Redactive used this tactic last year for another client, and “this felt like a more efficient way of presenting the information and had worked well on a different client” – Fay Rayner, Marketing Manager at Redactive.

Instead of distributing different pieces of paper, contacts had all necessary details (timings, schedule, directions, shortlist are in the email or a click away) on their phones at all times.

The results

With this campaign, Redactive managed to achieve a 53% open rate and 52% of click-to-open rate. Adestra’s Link and Heatmap reporting tools showed that the “Directions”, “About the Day” and “Shortlist” CTAs where the most clicked. This proves that Redactive did think of the overall customer experience and their needs on the day.

Redactive ensured this was a mobile responsive email since, as expected, most of their clients opened on mobile. This was supported by the results observed in Adestra’s Email Client detection feature, which showed that 70 % of contacts opened this email on a mobile device as opposed to 43% of contacts that opened it on Desktop.

In the future, Redactive plan to use this tactic for all their events:

“We received great feedback from the audience with 91% of survey respondents confirming that they received and used their e-ticket. We also had greater understanding of the attendee user journey and used the insights from the campaign report to tailor social media messaging on the day.

Across the business Redactive are looking to reduce waste and will be dropping guest directories, printed attendee guides and printed invites moving to a route similar to this on most events going forward. Having eTickets for this event reduced costs by 89%.” – Fay Rayner, Marketing Manager at Redactive.