Goodwood’s Apteco Award Winning Email Strategy
The Business Challenge
No two days are the same with nearly 30 different businesses and charities under the Goodwood umbrella.
Goodwood is always working to communicate so many different stories and brands, including events such as Horseracing, Motorsport, and music nights, as well as Hotels, membership clubs, and flying and driving experiences. This means there’s a consistent challenge of communicating all that Goodwood has to offer to its audience—the goal is to always deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
The challenge is that there is 1 shared customer that all the different business areas want to communicate with. This led to over-mailing and high unsubscribed as each business would send their own email, whether that individual had an interest in that area or not.
For example, Mrs Martin has engaged with Farms, Hotels, and Horseracing before but not motorsport. Despite this, she would receive emails from all of these business areas. This is an issue as it means all business areas were struggling to perform due to fatigue and deliverability issues. In turn, Goodwood saw reduced clicks to the website and a decline in click-through rates. We worked with Goodwood to move away from this and create a customer-focused email, delivering the right message to the right customer.
The Approach
We decided that we needed just 1 email per week which was completely personalised for each recipient’s interests across the 30 different business areas.
The objectives were clear:
- Increase click rate
Drive up average clicks per individual
Reduce unsubscribes
Prior to the introduction of the Estate Email, 2 different individuals with very different interests would receive the same emails from different areas of the business.
For example, Mrs Martin has only shown interest in the farm shop and the hotel, whilst Mr Smith has shown an interest in Festival of Speed and Motor Circuit but they both were receiving all 4 emails whether of interest or not.
The data we had of customer interests was not previously being utilised – email sending was blanket, alienating customers by over-mailing about content they never engaged with.
After the introduction of the Estate Email, each customer receives just 1 email with the content blocks all driven by their interests. Now Mrs Martin receives 1 email with content she’s most interested in, hotel and farm – whereas Mr Smith content blocks about Festival of Speed and Motor Circuit.
This approach also allows for cross-sell opportunities without harming overall engagement or deliverability. Instead of sending Mr Smith a dedicated email about Goodwood Farm, which is unlikely to get engagement as he has not previously expressed an interest in it, at the bottom of Mr Smith’s personalised estate email with content we already know he is interested in, we can add that information without harming the Click Through Rate or Unsubscribes.
This new approach means almost every section of the new email is dynamic, and where we have on average 8 different interests featured a week. The result is far less over-mailing and a much more engaging relevant weekly touchpoint.
Steps to Driving the Estate Email
The solution to deliver the Estate email was far from a simple campaign build so we needed tools that could handle complex campaigns and personalisation based on huge amounts of data and feeds so we turned to Apteco FastStats and PeopleStage to deliver this.
Before we could get into the campaign build, we first needed to understand how individuals interact with different business areas. To do this we ran an analysis within FastStats to define the rules for the various interest groups.
As each Business Area is very different, they require different criteria for someone to enter that interest group.
For example, actions to be assigned a farm shop interest are very different to actions to be assigned a hotel interest. There are various actions you can take to enter this interest group – via bookings, enquiries, clicks or WIFI usage amongst many others.
And for each of these actions, they needed their own bespoke recency and frequency rules applied to be retained in the interest, for example, how long should a click for an interest alone be kept versus a purchase and how many times do they need to click?
These rules need to be future-proofed to cover customer interest changes too.
In order to execute the estate email, we heavily relied on PeopleStage to create the automated campaign file. This file powers the email build, and where there are over 1000 interest combinations an individual could have, and every email delivered could be different we needed PeopleStage to deliver this.
This file is then pushed to the email service provider to drive the dynamics within each block of the email and for broadcast, delivering a fully personalised email for each individual, where every email could be different.
The Results
In terms of email performance, we sent to 70K less individuals, received 84K more clicks to the website, overall CTR increased by 2% and we reduced unsubscribes by 1.5%, so we hit all of our objectives.
In addition, we saw other benefits, we drove £4.5M in revenue from email.
We grew the engaged pot by 3% and on average interests grew from 3.1 to 3.6 per person so the cross-sell messaging was working too.
And to top it off we saved on average 16 hrs per month on email builds.
The Business Challenge
No two days are the same with nearly 30 different businesses and charities under the Goodwood umbrella.
Goodwood is always working to communicate so many different stories and brands, including events such as Horseracing, Motorsport, and music nights, as well as Hotels, membership clubs, and flying and driving experiences. This means there’s a consistent challenge of communicating all that Goodwood has to offer to its audience—the goal is to always deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
The challenge is that there is 1 shared customer that all the different business areas want to communicate with. This led to over-mailing and high unsubscribed as each business would send their own email, whether that individual had an interest in that area or not.
For example, Mrs Martin has engaged with Farms, Hotels, and Horseracing before but not motorsport. Despite this, she would receive emails from all of these business areas. This is an issue as it means all business areas were struggling to perform due to fatigue and deliverability issues. In turn, Goodwood saw reduced clicks to the website and a decline in click-through rates. We worked with Goodwood to move away from this and create a customer-focused email, delivering the right message to the right customer.
The Approach
We decided that we needed just 1 email per week which was completely personalised for each recipient’s interests across the 30 different business areas.
The objectives were clear:
- Increase click rate
Drive up average clicks per individual
Reduce unsubscribes
Prior to the introduction of the Estate Email, 2 different individuals with very different interests would receive the same emails from different areas of the business.
For example, Mrs Martin has only shown interest in the farm shop and the hotel, whilst Mr Smith has shown an interest in Festival of Speed and Motor Circuit but they both were receiving all 4 emails whether of interest or not.
The data we had of customer interests was not previously being utilised – email sending was blanket, alienating customers by over-mailing about content they never engaged with.
After the introduction of the Estate Email, each customer receives just 1 email with the content blocks all driven by their interests. Now Mrs Martin receives 1 email with content she’s most interested in, hotel and farm – whereas Mr Smith content blocks about Festival of Speed and Motor Circuit.
This approach also allows for cross-sell opportunities without harming overall engagement or deliverability. Instead of sending Mr Smith a dedicated email about Goodwood Farm, which is unlikely to get engagement as he has not previously expressed an interest in it, at the bottom of Mr Smith’s personalised estate email with content we already know he is interested in, we can add that information without harming the Click Through Rate or Unsubscribes.
This new approach means almost every section of the new email is dynamic, and where we have on average 8 different interests featured a week. The result is far less over-mailing and a much more engaging relevant weekly touchpoint.
Steps to Driving the Estate Email
The solution to deliver the Estate email was far from a simple campaign build so we needed tools that could handle complex campaigns and personalisation based on huge amounts of data and feeds so we turned to Apteco FastStats and PeopleStage to deliver this.
Before we could get into the campaign build, we first needed to understand how individuals interact with different business areas. To do this we ran an analysis within FastStats to define the rules for the various interest groups.
As each Business Area is very different, they require different criteria for someone to enter that interest group.
For example, actions to be assigned a farm shop interest are very different to actions to be assigned a hotel interest. There are various actions you can take to enter this interest group – via bookings, enquiries, clicks or WIFI usage amongst many others.
And for each of these actions, they needed their own bespoke recency and frequency rules applied to be retained in the interest, for example, how long should a click for an interest alone be kept versus a purchase and how many times do they need to click?
These rules need to be future-proofed to cover customer interest changes too.
In order to execute the estate email, we heavily relied on PeopleStage to create the automated campaign file. This file powers the email build, and where there are over 1000 interest combinations an individual could have, and every email delivered could be different we needed PeopleStage to deliver this.
This file is then pushed to the email service provider to drive the dynamics within each block of the email and for broadcast, delivering a fully personalised email for each individual, where every email could be different.
The Results
In terms of email performance, we sent to 70K less individuals, received 84K more clicks to the website, overall CTR increased by 2% and we reduced unsubscribes by 1.5%, so we hit all of our objectives.
In addition, we saw other benefits, we drove £4.5M in revenue from email.
We grew the engaged pot by 3% and on average interests grew from 3.1 to 3.6 per person so the cross-sell messaging was working too.
And to top it off we saved on average 16 hrs per month on email builds.
See what Apteco have to say about the award winning work
Our services
Our Services
Customer
Segmentation
Right message, right person, right time
Analysis & Measurement
Drive your performance through real data insight
Single Customer
View
One place, one customer, all the data
Marketing
Automation
Automate your customer journeys for effort free marketing execution
Marketing
Attribution
Accounting for every sale, through every channel
Joined-up
Marketing
Send the right message to every customer across all channels
Real-time
Marketing
Personalise your website and real time communications to create a unique customer experience
FastStats
& Peoplestage
We’re leading providers of FastStats and Peoplestage – powerful tools that will harness the power of your data
Our Services
Customer Segmentation
Analysis & Measurement
Single Customer View
Marketing Automation
Marketing Attribution
Joined-up Marketing
Real-time Marketing