Cutting through the noise with e-marketing

To maximise the intensive marketing around its 175^th anniversary year, Howarth Timber needed a strong and effective email marketing campaign to showcase ongoing events and promotions and drive traffic towards online sales.

The emails needed to be visually appealing, clear and concise and work seamlessly across different browsers and devices.

How did it happen?

To ensure consistency across campaigns we created a series of bare-bone templates, which we could use for the various e-shots. For each individual campaign we spent time thinking carefully about how to organise content to achieve the most click-throughs and showcase the offers to recipients.

Each email campaign was created through a careful and considered process involving redesigns and modifications until we were satisfied that both the copy and design were of high quality and were optimised to have the greatest impact on recipients.

One of Howarth Timber’s key events this year was a major Trade Day at Elland Road, which featured more than 70 suppliers. To help push this event we designed a campaign based around a countdown, which helped build up excitement as the event grew closer and recipients could see the great products on offer.

To help increase open rates we spent time creating A/B tests which allowed us to see which type of subject lines performed best along with what time of day had the greatest open rates. This helped us reach the maximum amount of recipients for each campaign.

To ensure all recipients had a positive experience we thoroughly tested each campaign to ensure that content was displayed correctly on different browsers and that content would pass all Spam filter tests.

What were the results?

• Campaigns created during 2015: 35
• Total number of emails sent: 475,856
• Number of e-shots opened: 85,500
• Number of e-shots clicked: 5,130

Results from the campaigns were very positive, with high open and click through rates from all campaigns. This has led to increased traffic on the website along with leading to conversions with sales of key products.

After each campaign we routinely analyse the data to examine and identify trends which may help us create more successful campaigns in the future. Email marketing is a continuous process of refinement and improvement and we will continue to develop our campaigns into 2016 and beyond.