Background
Our creative vehicle for Ecclesiastical is highly distinctive consisting of painted hands to complement our end line ‘You’re in good hands,’ reflecting in turn Ecclesiastical’s ‘hand’ logo.
For the new on-line product, sticking with painted hands, we created The Sprinters to convey speed of service – two little chaps, one for charity, one for care, that were actually the left and right hand of our hand model.
About our email – using Vismail
A major part of the campaign was to target Ecclesiastical’s existing brokers so direct marketing made a lot of sense and since we were promoting an online service, email seemed the obvious choice.
However email click through rates can be depressingly low and this was not a volume campaign. We had a target audience of fractionally over 5,000. A one per cent click-through rate was going to be no good to anyone.
So we opted for a rich media email solution. We created a hilarious little film of our fingers in an actual sprint race and very much in the style of Chariots of Fire. And we choose to work with a company called Vismail whose proprietary software enables graphics and embedded videos to get past firewalls – the video actually plays on opening the email. The film and the Vismail technology had a major impact on click-through rate.
Target Audience
Direct activity: existing Ecclesiastical brokers.
Timescale
April 2010
Budget
Vismail license and distribution costs: £2,000
Creative fee: £2,000
Film production: £10,000 (however the film was also used at live events and in online rich media advertising)
Results
Vismail eDMs
- 5,084 delivered:
- 1066 opened (21 per cent)
- Email re-forwarded on average 3.5 times (total times opened: 3556)
- 522 click throughs (10 per cent – substantially above industry averages)
Extract from Ecclesiastical Results Summary document
“The ‘contacts who opened’ figure shows that of the people directly on the email list 20.97 per cent opened the email, but then they – on average – forwarded it to another 3.5 people each.
This is represented by the ‘total times ‘opened’ figure (3,556), showing the total amount of times the emails were opened, including any forwards to friends and any subsequent re-forwards as well. At 69.94 per cent of total send, this figure is outstanding, showing that the message was clearly well received and, more importantly, considered good enough and important enough to share with others.
Looking at the raw data tables, it shows that those that did forward it on often did so to large groups of people (5+) or that the emails kept getting re-forwarded on to friends of friends and so on (the system can only uniquely track the first person who opens it, every subsequent person is listed as a ”re-open’ of the first person’s email). The most striking example is one contact whose email was opened a total of 106 times – that’s a lot of forwards/re-forwards!
Interestingly, an activity graph shows that the email continues to be opened (and clicked on) a month after it was initially sent out!. These figures are remarkable because Vismail reports that usually the majority of campaigns are over in three business days, and the campaign is effectively ‘dead’ within a week of being sent.”
