Birthday email delivers an 11.6% conversion rate for Winterbourne

Brand

Winterbourne is a heritage attraction. Part of the University of Birmingham, it comprises a spectacular botanic garden and an early 20^th century villa.

Objectives

• Make their subscribers feel special
• Nurture the relationship with their subscribers
• Encourage subscribers to visit the attraction

The Challenge

To every business a customer’s email address is hugely valuable. With this in mind, the Winterbourne team wanted to avoid a sales-led approach and instead get to know their subscribers better and build loyalty over time.

The Solution

Winterbourne’s marketing team understood that if they wanted to nurture their subscribers, they’d need to know more about them. Therefore, they created a preference center asking for their subscribers’ date of birth, gender and interests to tailor their emails and offer them a more personalized experience. This preference center was sent in a single campaign to their current subscribers, or as a subscription confirmation email to new signups.

As promised in their ‘update your preferences’ email, they created a birthday program looking at the contact’s date of birth and sent a email with a birthday treat inside. This birthday email was personalized with the subscriber’s name and a voucher that was specific to them and that could be only redeemed in-store, growing the in-store traffic in an area where the subscriber could fully experience the brand’s personality.

Results

This automated birthday email has performed exceptionally, seeing high engagement rates as well as achieving excellent offline conversion rates:

• 79% open rate
• 11.6% conversion rate

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