Juicy dialogue from innocent drinks
The gang at innocent have led the way in engaging and very cool communications with their fans and customers. Usually email marketing campaigns can be dissected by examining issues such as incentivisation and ROI. The innocent drinks weekly email newsletter, however, reads more like a collection of cool stuff a friend might send you on a Friday afternoon.
Although product launches or company announcements do get mentions, you’ll also find links to models of ants' nests, the world's poshest treehouse, odd-shaped clouds and labradors in tutus.
While some companies spend considerable sums of money ensuring the design, wording and mechanics of their email marketing campaigns deliver a tangible return, innocent, for now, are far more pragmatic in their approach.
Touching base
Andrew Bullock, innocent's Below the Line Communications Manager, and one of the three people who work on the newsletter together each week, isn't at all evasive on this point: 'At the moment, communications to our family members are all about ensuring we give people a window into what’s going on at Fruit Towers: a combination of news on what we’re up to, unusual things we’ve stumbled across as well as updates on what’s going on in the product kitchen.'
People really do want to know what's going on at innocent's
Shepherds Bush HQ - on a daily basis enamoured consumers turn up for a tour of
Fruit Towers and the company regularly receives gifts in the post – once 150
handmade cakes, one for every employee.
It's this sort of devotion that innocent engenders, not just through its
products, but through the dialogue it maintains with customers, something
exemplified by the email newsletter.
As Andrew points out: 'It's about making sure what we send people is the kind of content they want to receive; we want to make sure that what we communicate to family members is interesting, engaging and raises the occasional smile.'
Turning to PureResponse
This said, the team at Pure360 can remember a time when the innocent email newsletter was being produced in their outlook system, in plain text, manually adding the recipients into the 'BCC' field and sent out on a desktop.
When their subscribers grew as exponentially as the company, innocent realised that pasting 5,000 addresses into an email was not only impractical but they should really start finding out whether people were actually reading their newsletter.
Turning to the PureResponse email software solution, they were able to begin to see how many people were opening their email marketing campaign and how deep they were going.
With a new and comprehensive insight into what content the family were engaging with, innocent were able to tailor future email campaigns to give people more of what they wanted.
Gathering feedback
This isn't quite the one-sided relationship it might sound. There's much to be gained from such a loyal and engaged audience.
In the past they've canvassed the family for new flavours of smoothies, had them vote for the ad they'd most like to see on TV and are now using their opinions and responses to create new features and shape their promotional events.
In return, innocent family members will be the first to know when tickets for innocent's summer fete go live in the next few months.
One day innocent asked if they should build a fete finder, to tie in with a proposed tour of the UK's fetes in the summer – 90% of people gave the idea the thumbs up – so they built it. This is the basis on which innocent make many of their decisions.
The value of feedback from this audience of motivated consumers is immense. Why spend huge sums on market research when you've got an ever-increasing on-hand panel of switched on and engaged people, who actively want to help you?
Family planning
This is partly why there hasn't been any rush to monetise their audience, Andrew elaborates: 'We are planning a much more comprehensive strategy for communications to the family, but we’ll weigh up all the options first - we certainly won’t jump without thinking about ROI for some types of communications.
'Ultimately, it doesn’t cost any more money to send emails via the Pure360 system (link to PureResponse)to another 10,000 people. However, we’ll want to make sure that we are more targeted and what we send people is going to delight them and be useful and interesting to them.'
'What we're doing is using the best tools to do the job that give us an understanding of what people want to see but tread very carefully in terms of how we interact with our consumers.'
Clearly, whatever route innocent take with their email marketing, it seems a safe bet that it will receive a very warm welcome from the innocent family.
