success stories

Handling a database on a large scale in a fast moving consumer market threw up a whole host of challenges for Electric Word.

The specialist information publisher had to step up its game to meet demands and found only a bespoke solution with a large capacity would do - enter Pure's filter by 'Date Since Sign-up' feature.

Electric Word

When you’re managing a database in a fast moving consumer market, where subscribers can have short attention spans, the main challenge is to seize people’s attention early on. The further challenge of working on a large scale often means the best solution is to rely on an automated system.

For specialist information publisher, Electric Word, in the first month when leads are at their most responsive - time definitely is money. And with a huge list of around 260,000 recipients to keep up with, they quickly realised only a bespoke, automated solution could cope with the scale of their demands.

Peak performers

Electric Word’s ‘Sports Performance’ publishing brand informs high caliber athletes, coaches and physiotherapists about the latest developments in sports training.

It focuses on boiling down the latest research from weighty sports science journals into information the average athlete or coach can benefit from and use.

‘Our weekly e-zine’s main aim is to get subscribers to convert to our paid subscription list, which includes books and third party products,’ says Online Manager, Mark Edwards. ‘Experience has shown our leads tend to be at their hottest in the first month, so the pressure was on to maximise that potential.’

Developing a bespoke system

Mark monitored the response to a large variety of Sports Performance marketing material and realised they were missing a trick.

A number of e-shots were receiving a particularly high response. However, since the material was on rotation many subscribers weren't’t receiving these high-performance emails until up to two months into their subscription.

‘We needed a system that allowed us to get the most out of our best marketing material, while being able to cope with the enormous amount of data we use,’ says Mark.

As a solution, Electric Word developed a flexible ‘auto response’ system to send out an automatic series of pre-programmed emails, ensuring each new subscriber received Sports Performance’s best material first.

Juggling two systems

On top of this, the online marketing team had experienced frustrations at the hands of their previous system which was slow at downloading data and often crashed.

They had also been unable to upload legacy data due to the system’s strict limits – it would only accept data that had been obtained through a double rather than single opt-in process. As a result the team was compelled to juggle new and old lists between two systems.

‘Our database is constantly growing, and most of our expense as a company is on people and their time’ says Mark, ‘so running two systems was a massive drain on our resources.

‘Pure produced a bespoke version of our auto response system, filter by 'Date Since Sign-up', so we were able to integrate the process with PureUnlimited. This allowed us the vital flexibility to upload our old data to one place and grow the size of our list at will, without increasing costs.’

A model for the future

The new automated system turned out to be a great asset. Electric Word measured a dramatic increase in the number of subscriptions being won, coupled with improvements in both the turnaround time and deliverability of their e-shots.

With a recent acquisition under their belt this more efficient and productive way of managing online marketing campaigns was good news for the busy marketing team.

‘We now have an online model that really works,’ says Mark. ‘It’s profitable and we will roll that out to our other areas of business in the future.’