success stories

Whatever the objectives you set out for your email marketing, to achieve them you need to not only be able to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns, month-on-month, you need to make sure they're actually going to reach your recipients.

For Field & Trek, one of the largest retailers of outdoor clothing and equipment in the UK, using their in-house system was preventing them from reaching either of these goals.

With no built-in reporting function, in order to see which elements of their messages were being clicked on and where recipients were making purchases, every link had to be coded by hand, given a unique URL, and once a send had gone out, tracked through their web analytics program.

When this meant encoding up to 30 links, for everything that could be made clickable – titles, images, links – producing one email was taking almost a whole day.

Even then, without the ability to see open and click-through rates, or even how many mails had made it to their recipients' inboxes, they had little or no feedback on the success of each campaign and therefore no way to improve them in future.

Turning to an external email marketing package, PureResponse, allowed Field & Trek to not only solve the problems that had already been causing so many headaches but allowed them to protect their email marketing from being marked as spam.

Gaining a clearer insight

With an online reporting system that automatically tracked every individual click, they had an immediate overview of which links were popular and which weren't working, how many emails were being opened and how many were bouncing.

Straight away they started gaining some real insight into how best to produce their campaigns – checking what kind of subject lines were hooking their audience in, sending out two different creatives to compare results, changing the location of an offer on the page to see which resulted in more sales.

Following a successful discovery, Field & Trek would adopt it as standard practice, and with every email further improve the open and click-through rates, and sales generated.

With the time that would have spent encoding links, they were able to focus on other improvements they knew would further optimise deliverability, instil a sense of trust in their recipients and, as a consequence, safeguard their campaigns against the risk of being blocked.

Giving customers clarity

Every month they had been getting calls from customers who were receiving multiple deliveries of the same email, or who had tried to unsubscribe and it hadn't seemed to work.

At best this had incurred time dealing with enquiries, searching the email database to find and remove the customer's details; at worst it meant their messages were being perceived as spam and reported.

The reason behind this was usually that a customer had registered more than once with Field & Trek, following a repeat order, with more than one email address.

In response to this, a short personalised message was added to the top of every email stating which email address had subscribed to their list. They also added two other personalised fields, containing the recipient's first name and customer number.

As a result of this simple addition, almost immediately the calls stopped. Recipients could now clearly see that they had subscribed, the email was a legitimate communication and being sent because they were a registered customer of Field & Trek.

Avoiding the spam filters

In the past, if any of their recipients did mark messages as spam, they'd have to wait for a warning from the email service provider, trawl through their database and remove the offending address. Any delay would run the risk of being blocked from that web mail provider altogether.

Now the moment someone hits the spam button, their email system automatically blocks any further messages being sent to that address and compiles them all to a list.

This means their campaigns don't fall foul of the major web mail provider's spam filters and allows them to remove that list from their database, keeping their data clean and giving a truly accurate picture of their campaign's success.

Lee Patmore, Field & Trek's Internet Marketing Manager, is more than happy with their decision to move to a professional email service provider: 'because of the systems Pure has in place and the way we can use that information, it's not only keeping our list clean, but helping our database to grow and making sure that the people we email are the people who want to receive it.'