Using email marketing to drive charity support
There are 2.5m people living with cancer in the UK today, and as more people live longer with their cancer due to advancements in treatment and early identification, this number is set to grow beyond 4m by 2030. At Macmillan Cancer Support, we work to reach and improve the lives of those impacted by cancer and to inspire millions of others to do the same. We want to make sure we can provide support to everyone who needs it, to help people affected feel more in control of their lives.
Our marketing campaigns therefore need to be powerful, impactful and wide reaching. We’re getting increasingly strategic about how we use email as a key channel within the wider marketing suite of tools and platforms to achieve this.
When used well, email marketing can allow charities like ours to reach a wider audience, raising awareness and ultimately driving the donations we depend on. However, for these emails to be effective, they need to be nuanced correctly in order to reach the right people at the right time, with the right message. Charitable outreach is a finely balanced act of our communications strategy and everything needs to be engaging, intuitive, and contextually situated.
We work with dotmailer, the email marketing automation platform, to help us face this challenge, and were delighted when our work on our “October Online Shop Campaign 2015” was recently shortlisted for the “Best e-commerce Campaign of the Year” award in its first ever Dotties awards ceremony. Here are some of the key learnings and insights from the roll-out of this campaign.
Getting the timing right
As mentioned above, reaching people at the right time with email marketing is crucial. It’s important to plan ahead, assessing peak fundraising times, to ensure your messages land ahead of these.
Our online shop, selling our branded merchandise and charity products, is a fundamental part of our fundraising effort. As with many charities, our shop has a critical trading period in the run up to Christmas (we sell various festive gifts, as well as wrapping paper and Christmas cards) which we push in October, in preparation for this peak selling time just as consumers are starting to begin (or finish, depending on how organised they are!) their Christmas shopping.
Optimising messaging
The next step is ensuring you send the right messages in order to grab your audience’s attention.
The challenge we face with marketing our online shop to our supporters is that we are in the great position of having a large engaged database, but also face competition around the organisation with many teams keen to talk to our audiences.
Taking control of the frequency of communication with supporters is important. We want to ensure they hear from us with relevant information, but we definitely don’t want to overload them with marketing emails. We follow a process of prioritisation to avoid duplication between campaigns across different areas of the charity, and it’s important that we’re selective.
Choosing the right technology
The good news is there are numerous creative and automation tools out there to help with this process. In the lead up to our October shop email campaign, we took advantage of dotmailer’s personalisation, A/B testing and mobile optimisation tools.
This personalisation tool allows marketers to avoid the “one size fits all” approach, ensuring you can include personalised information for each customer or prospect being targeted. We used device personalisation tools to hide extraneous content on mobile, giving supporters a cleaner experience.
A/B testing enabled us to assess the effectiveness of different subject lines and creative content of the emails, and constantly refine and improve the function, picking off the highest performing tactics and messaging and binning those which were less effective.
Implementing an evidence based approach
As we have to be particularly selective with email marketing, we have been implementing a more evidence based approach over the past year.
The shop strategy now includes a standardised reporting format, a pre-agreed schedule of A/B testing, and comprehensive mid-year and end-year reviews of activity and learnings. dotmailer’s campaign comparison and reporting tools make pulling and comparing results quick and easy, while linking up with our Google Analytics account means we can report on which campaign variations deliver the best sale conversions.
In addition to this, in preparation for our October emails, we carried out a comprehensive review of individual past email performance and based the creative on what we learnt.
For example, we tested a large 600 pixels by 600 pixels square hero panel against our usual landscape version and found our click-to-open rate (engagement) increased by 28%.
As each month’s online shop email focuses only on one narrow product range, we introduced a navigation bar to the top of the creative to mirror the store sections from the web and found this also helped increase click-throughs, generating 58 unique clicks in the first test.
The results were good
The October 2015 shop emails performed hugely above the yearly average, particularly on the click-to-open-rate (CTOR) metric. For this campaign, previous purchasers of our online shop had a CTOR of 28% and non-purchasers, 25%. This represents a three-fold increase of an annual average of just over 9%.
Click-through rates were 9% and 7% respectively, against an annual average of 1.7%. Both the new photographic treatment and the navigation bar drove significant numbers of click-throughs. More than 40% of the total clicks from both previous purchasers and non-purchasers came from the large square image and the navigation.
In terms of sale results the October campaign that implemented these learnings achieved a 6% conversion rate.
Changing perceptions internally
Since joining Macmillan Cancer Support just over a year ago, and in particular in the lead up to the October Shop Campaign, changing perceptions internally has been important.
Previously, emails have been viewed as an add-on to other marketing activity. I have worked closely with colleagues across the charity to advocate the use of email and best practice in reaching key audiences and driving donations. I have encouraged colleagues to invest time in testing and analysing email activity to maximise the effect of future campaigns.
Increasingly, email is now seen as a fundamental part of our communications activity rather than just an extra. The systematic approach to testing, reviewing and learning we have developed working with our shop colleagues has helped us move in the direction of greater quality control, and stronger, more efficient and effective email marketing strategies when engaging with supporters.
Moving forward with testing
We are continually trying to provide our readers with a more tailored, personalised and relevant shop newsletters to help increase engagement and sales.
Since October we’ve tested send days and times to see when recipients are most engaged and have time to shop with us. We’ve implemented some learnings from late 2015 such as using a larger call to action button in our main hero image, which we’ve found helps drive click-throughs as more people are now opening our emails on mobile devices. We’re systematically testing subject lines to drive open rates, and early results show our supporters enjoy a good laugh with our humorous wording.
We’re also hoping to test tailoring content to our readers, so women see female versions of our clothing range and men the male equivalent, as well as introducing completely different content for new subscribers compared to our loyal customer base.
This Christmas we’re particularly excited to try out testing animated hero panels that will cycle through a range of our Christmas offerings. Animating our hero panel makes use of "prime email real estate" and allows recipients to spot something they might otherwise miss if we only had a still panel.
