How Six Brands Deliver Email Campaigns With Less Effort And More Impact

Email overload isn’t just a pain point for consumers. Brands feel it too. Only for brands, it’s about finding the time and resources to craft the type of emails that will stand out in a crowded inbox.

According to our most recent Adobe Consumer Email Survey, email remains the most preferred method of contact by brands and can drive up to 40 percent of customers to purchase. However, email engagement isn’t easy.

In fact, 69 percent of personal email offers go unopened, and 45 percent of consumers place high importance on customized emails. Additionally 42 percent of consumers feel indifference when dealing with personal emails, according to our research.

Given these facts, you can’t afford to get it wrong. Fortunately, success doesn’t have to involve Herculean feats of effort.

From travel to banking, there are a number of smart brands like Virgin Holidays, Royal London, and Heathrow Airport who have discovered that the right campaign management solution—Adobe Campaign—can significantly reduce high-effort tasks. Whether it’s designing emails and segmenting audiences or allowing for more personalized and effective communications — these brands are achieving better results with less effort.

And if they can entice more customers into booking exotic beach vacations or signing up for a new credit card — you can do it too. Below you will find our best practices for effortless, effective email campaigns, with examples of brands that are mastering the art of email marketing.

Tip: Make email a cross-channel experience

Customers may prefer email, but it’s not their only way of engaging with your brand. Email campaigns will be most effective when they acknowledge the multiple channels and experiences your customers have with your brand. When you can make your email communications pick up the conversation where your customers left off, whether that’s an abandoned online shopping cart or a recent text message, it’s not only a more personalized experience, it’s a more effective one.

**Virgin Holidays
**Crawley, United Kingdom

For more than 30 years, Virgin Holidays has been delivering compelling customer experiences from the moment a person starts musing about a vacation to the day of departure and beyond. But as customers move from fantasy to purchase, the journey often crosses multiple channels, both online and offline.

By developing campaigns that cover online and offline touchpoints, Virgin Holidays has achieved measurable improvements. For example, through their “Save Your Spot” promotion, each customer received a personalized email with a unique code and an invitation to unlock it for an unknown discount at the nearest Virgin Holidays retail store.

Incorporating a cross-channel experience into the email campaign helped increase engagement as customers were curious to discover their discount. It also created an ideal opportunity for agents to start in-person conversations about the customer’s upcoming holiday plans.

“Using Adobe Campaign for our ‘Peak Sale’ campaign, we saw a 20% uplift in sales and an 85% increase in web traffic,” said Saul Lopes, Customer Lifecycle Lead, Virgin Holidays. “We also ran a ‘Save Your Spot’ promotion to drive retail appointments at our stores. The campaign delivered 156% more appointments than it did the previous year.”

Virgin Holidays also reports four times higher email engagement rates and an 11% increase in upsells. Read their story.

**Redtag.ca **Ontario, Canada

Redtag.ca opened their doors in 2004, just as the travel agency landscape was shifting significantly toward digital. To deliver better digital experiences, the company took a data-driven approach — including finding the most effective ways for customers to engage with the brand.

As customers began to interact with Redtag.ca through multiple channels — online, mobile, email, and their call center — engagement strategies became more complex for the company. To keep up, they knew they needed to better consolidate customer profile data across channels so that they could deliver highly personalized experiences based on a customer’s location, context, preferences, or use of a channel.

Using Adobe Campaign, Redtag.ca was able to gain a richer view of customer journeys, making it easier to identify the best cross-channel marketing opportunities. For instance, they could see that customers used mobile more frequently for search, but that higher-value orders came from the desktop. These insights allowed Redtag.ca to develop effective cross-channel experiences.

****“Adobe Campaign and Adobe Analytics enable us to remove friction from the overall process, develop true cross-channel experiences, measure engagement, and see where mobile experiences drive more customers to higher-converting channels with higher average order values,” said Roberto Gennaro, Chief Digital Officer, Redtag.ca

Redtag.ca also discovered that customers are 50% less likely to buy if they have a poor mobile experience. Read their story.

Tip 2: Automate and templatize your email marketing efforts

If all your time is tied up in creating targeted email lists and creating multiple email designs for each audience, it’s hard to find the time to create and test new types of campaigns. And when innovation lags, your results often lag as well. Finding a way to automate and templatize your email campaign efforts will save you valuable time that you can reinvest in crafting even more effective email campaigns.

**Royal London **London, United Kingdom

The mutual insurance company Royal London works to cultivate long-term relationships with their customers and help them get the most from their investment portfolios. As part of these efforts, Royal London wanted a more efficient way to send emails to customers about its financial products.

Using Adobe Campaign, Royal London has been able to achieve this goal. They now use email templates with modular copy and images. Using customer profile information, they create custom versions of communications for each audience segment which include personalized messages that resonate with the audience. They can also now target delivery times for optimum engagement and relevancy.

As an added bonus, increased automation has given Royal London’s marketers more time for analyzing performance and customer behaviors to further improve campaign impacts. In their first year, they surpassed their ROI expectations within eight months.

“A basic email campaign used to take two to three weeks to create manually and launch,” said Ajay Solanki, Consumer Digital Lead, Royal London Mutual Insurance Society Limited. “Using Adobe Campaign, we’re more automated and can deliver multiple campaigns in a week that include more targeted communications.” Royal London also achieved 158% of their revenue goal in one year. Read their story.

**Oregon Community Credit Union **Eugene, Oregon

Oregon Community Credit Union (OCCU) focuses on delivering incredibly high-quality service to their 158,000 member-owners. Yet, with limited resources to compete with international financial brands, they have to make the most of what resources they do have.

Adobe Campaign has helped OCCU do more with less. The credit union can set up fully automated, ongoing targeted campaigns. Once established, these campaigns can run smoothly without interference from marketers.

For example, for one of its first major personalized email campaigns, OCCU wanted to increase credit card accounts by sending preapproval emails to every qualified member. When members clicked on the call-to-action button in the email, they were brought to a dynamic credit card offer landing page that used the unique Adobe Campaign ID to pre-populate fields with the member’s first name and offer details. All members needed to do was fill in three remaining pieces of identifying information and click “accept.”

OCCU set a goal for 400 new credit card accounts in the first six months. They more than doubled that number by signing up 944 new credit card accounts — achieving 235% of their goal — with an acceptance rate of 3.42%. That’s 2,150 new cards opened and over $22 million in new credit card lines in less than 18 months. Read their story.

Tip 3: Personalize the experience

Customized content isn’t only effective — it’s expected. Personalization comes in many forms, from timing your emails to a customer’s real-time action to incorporating content in your message specific to the recipient’s interest. Achieving this kind of personalization at scale is essential to engaging your customers. Fortunately, there are ways to make personalization easier and scalable, so you can send more effective emails more often.

**Hostelworld **Dublin, Ireland

Hostelworld’s customers are young and tech savvy, and they expect digital experiences that are convenient, fast, and personal. To deliver the type of personalized communications their customers expect, Hostelword uses Adobe Campaign.

Adobe Campaign lets Hostelworld build out detailed audience segments so they can tailor their email communications with the right message at the right time. It also lets them scale up their email communications. Before Adobe Campaign, Hostelworld struggled to send out 300 emails. Now, their marketers deliver more than one billion personalized emails per year — to customers all over the globe and at different points in their journeys.

“Even though we’re sending out so many more emails, we’re seeing lower unsubscribe rates and higher click-through rates,” said Otto Rosenberger, CMO, Hostelworld Group. “The difference is that we’re using segmentation to target customers with only the deals and information that they’ll find interesting.” Today, 61% of bookings are from repeat Hostelworld customers. Read their story.

**Heathrow International Airport **London, United Kingdom

London Heathrow Airport is more than just a place to begin and end a trip. It has more than 300 retail stores, restaurants, and lounges for travelers to enjoy their time at the airport.

Email is a key driver for revenue growth at Heathrow. But, with consumers overwhelmed by marketing emails, it’s become harder to stand out. Rather than flooding inboxes with general promotional emails, Heathrow uses Adobe Campaign to deliver 130 carefully targeted email campaigns for a total of 5 million email messages a month.

Emails can be triggered by specific actions, such as when a customer signs on to the airport’s Wi-Fi network. Emails can also be personalized based on data from rewards members. For example, some customers may receive news about a new luxury watch, while others may get an offer for a massage.

****“Adobe Campaign allows us to personalize emails to get the right offer to customers,” said Stuart Irvine, Analytics and Optimization Lead, Heathrow Airport. “We’re delivering messages that pique our customers’ interests and makes them want to learn more, which has helped us improve open rates and achieve click-through rates as high as 25%.” Heathrow raised the average spend per customer by 60% and achieved click-through rates as high as 25%. Read their story.

Increase engagement without all the effort

As Heathrow, Virgin Holidays, and these other brands highlighted already know, it’s much easier and more efficient to have technology that automates and streamlines all the complicated pieces of a successful email campaign. This allows you to better keep up with and respond to customers’ cross-channel journeys as well as to increase email engagement through greater personalization. Most importantly, it results in getting more of your emails opened, read, and responded to — which is the ultimate win.

Adobe can help

Adobe Campaign simplifies the effort required to create highly effective, personalized email campaigns. It helps you effortlessly craft email campaigns that are perfectly tuned to your customers’ interests and to their journeys. In turn, this makes it easier than ever for your prospects to respond to your latest offer or to develop more loyalty to your brand.

Adobe Campaign also allows your team to do more with less. You’ll have more time to hone your email campaign strategies, narrow down your audiences, and send more emails — which will pay off with higher email engagement.

Learn more about Adobe Campaign and discover how it can help you achieve your business goals with true personalization. Get details.