Sense and respond: a case study of implementing a personalised retail email campaign

How intelligent segmentation helped Homebase drive instore bookings and increased revenue

eCircle worked with their client Homebase to support them in increasing their Ecommerce revenue through planning and executing a highly targeted personalised triggered email campaign, to sell their high value kitchens.

This blog post takes you through the campaign goals, planning and execution and to show the approach Homebase used.

Email Campaign Goals

The business goal of Homebase was primarily to increase their sales revenue of their high value products (kitchens) by drawing in customers instore to meet their Kitchen Designers, leading to high-end conversions. The shift was also to move away from a discounted pricing strategy of offering vouchers.

The challenge was how to showcase and sell their specialist kitchens (design and installation) via email ?

Working with eCircle, they planned a targeted triggered email campaign which was relevant and timely to their customers.

Let's look further at their email campaign:

Target audience

Historically, Homebase’s target audience was to convert prospective customers and the refocus was to attract customers prior to purchase earlier on in the decision-making process through the sales funnel.

So how did they identify interest and intent of their site visitors?  Through Categorised Link Tracking. By identifying those who clicked in their newsletter on' kitchen related links’, provided the 'warm customers' who were at the right stage in the decision-making process (a similar approach can potentially be used on site where visitors are signed-in).

Email Communications Approach

A series of 3 triggered emails were sent via eCircle’s email software, to target those who were clicking on the identified links, and within 24 hours these ‘kitchen clickers’ were receiving their first follow-up tailored email - Call-to-action (CTA) to book an appointment.

A series of two emails followed with clear CTAs.

• Email Communication Schedule

Email 1

This triggered email was sent 24 hours after subscribers to the newsletter had clicked on 'kitchen related' links. This was more of a product range awareness email to raise the awareness of their range of kitchens.

Results?

• Greatest engagement of the three emails - 45% open rate and CTR of 8.4%.
• 70% conversion rate of clickers who booked an appointment
• Those who clicked the appointment link – 6% made a direct purchase and 7% reserve and collect.

Email 2

The purpose of the second triggered email was to drive subscribers to book an appointment instore.

Results?

• 38% open rate and 3.5% CTR
• Clickers of 'arrange a free appointment' to go the landing page; 5% of clicks and 36% conversion rate.
• Clickers on 'appointment link'; 4% made direct purchase and 1% reserve and collect.
• Interesting many clicks on logos not ready to convert

Email 3

The last in the series of the triggered emails reinforced all of the key messages from the campaigns, with testimonials and the multiple CTAs still achieved high clickthrough rates

Results?

• 34% open rate and CTR of 5.35%.
• 86% appointment booking conversion, 8% direct purchase and 4% reserve and collect

Email Analytics

Conversion goal tracking was applied across all emails to measure:

• Number of bookings
• Reserve a product
• Number of direct purchases one week after receipt of these emails.

Results

'Using triggered email marketing to move customers through the sales funnel has helped us achieve 45x ROI on the campaign alone'.  Online Marketing Manager at Homebase, Jennifer Wright

Overall the campaign was extremely successful and the primary goal of instore appointment bookings achieved 48% of recipients booking. The subsequent average conversion from appointment to purchase was 40% and an additional 1million plus revenue was gained. Learn more tips from Richard Austin's post on how to boost revenue with your email marketing.

The secondary objectives of 'direct purchase' and 'reserve to collect', achieve 18% and 12% respectively.

Looking at the email campaigns, they were successful. Typical email open rates were 20-25% and 2-3.5% CTR and these email campaigns achieved 20% higher.

Key Learnings

• Email 1 was the most successful, with a 45% open rate compared to 38% and 35% of the follow-up triggered emails.
• Higher levels of engagement with personalised and targeted email campaigns, increased open rates and ROI for Homebase.
• Monitoring CTRs and having the ability to change text links to buttons, increased CTRs for example, making video a CTA button.
• Flexible email template to re-order CTAs above the fold is important as they monitored online behaviour.
• More CTAs can still achieve high CTRs.

'The email campaign has enabled us to target customers who are in the consideration phase for a big purchase and highlight our key services and information just when the customer needs it ”

Jennifer Wright Online Marketing Manager”, Home base.

Matt Clarke is the Director of Operations and Professional Services at eCircle. Matt leads the UK Operations team to deliver fantastic solutions and support for eCircle's clients. Previously has worked client-side for over 12 years, most recently with BP where he led usability and design as part of a global web team. During his career Matt has specialised in many areas including Usability, Accessibility, Web Design and SEO. . You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.