Email has long been accepted as one of the most powerful and cost effective digital channels available, and Teradata’s director Mark Ash will be leading a session at Performance Marketing Insights next week on how the sector continues to revolutionise performance marketing. In the mean time, learn how the email specialists rejuvenated the Science Museum Group’s approach to digital marketing, improving engagement by over 100%:
The Science Museum Group is devoted to the history and contemporary practice of science, medicine, technology, industry and media.
With five million visitors each year and an unrivalled collection, it is the most significant group of museums of science and innovation worldwide.
The Group consists of: Science Museum, Museum of Science and Industry, National Railway Museum (York), National Media Museum and National Railway Museum (Shildon).
Challenge
The Science Museum Group approached Teradata Interactive with three core, yet common, challenges with their email marketing campaigns:
- A lack of information about individual customer preferences
- A high level of unsubscribes
- A low levels of merchandise sales
Crucially they wanted to better engage with their audience to promote relevant events, gallery openings, special offers and other timely messages, to increase footfall and merchandise sales, reducing reliance on the generalist approach they had previously used.
They recognised the power of email in communicating these messages to customers, but needed advice and support to make more effective use of their data assets.
The Group had previously depended on data that contained little information about the profile or individual interests of their subscriber, causing a disconnection between the recipient and the brand.
Communications being sent out were encouraging unsubscribes due to the messages being irrelevant to the recipient; for example information about adult events could be sent to families.
Teradata Interactive aimed to solve these issues through two approaches:
- Re-engage with existing sign-ups and enhance subscriber profiles using a preference centre within Digital Messaging Center, Teradata’s email broadcast platform.
- Boost the existing database with new subscribers, acquiring important demographic and interest information at the point of capture.
Both of these approaches are critical to delivering effective email marketing campaigns. Preference centres provide valuable insight into customers’ expectations and needs, which allow marketers to tailor their messages to the right recipient. While new subscribers can help to reinvigorate databases with potential new customers.
Solution
In order to achieve this Teradata identified three areas that needed attention:
- A landing page and preference centre needed to be created to acquire important demographic information at the point of contact capture.
- Welcome programs needed to be launched to drive traffic to the Science Museum Group website.
- Their existing database needed to be segmented according to particular preferences in order for more effective targeting to be achieved.
In order to re-engage with existing subscribers to capture specific information, existing subscribers were emailed regularly as part of an ongoing CRM strategy. This encompassed multiple messages from the various Science Museum Group brands.
Mechanisms used included automatically triggered email welcome programs, re-engagement emails driving traffic to a preference centre and regular email newsletters to maintain constant relevant contact with customers.
These regular email programs were generally sent either weekly or monthly, depending on which brand from the Science Museum Group initiated the communication in the first place.
After identifying the key segments in the Teradata interactive email database, the team sent through multiple messages to the agreed target audience for each campaign. This encouraged openers to click through to a dedicated landing page and subscribe to the Science Museum newsletter program, which helped ensure they were engaging with the Science Museum Group audience every step of the way. Only a valid sign-up was paid for.
To instantly cement the relationship with the new subscriber, Teradata deployed a welcome message program thanking them for signing up and inviting them to visit the museum website. The data was immediately fed into the Digital Messaging Center recipient database to become part of the new CRM program.
This newly sourced data was then used in a stage two program on the operations side as part of the welcome program, to increase interest.
Through the use of the Digital Messaging Center, Teradata delivered key marketing messages to what is now a highly targeted and engaged list; driving subscribers back through to the museum website for event pre-registration or further information.
In order to boost the existing database with new active opt-ins from specific segments Teradata Interactive worked closely with The Group to develop a clear strategy.
They had a clear idea about who they wanted to attract to the different museum programs, so these audience profiles were used as the foundation for creating target segments for the lead generation campaign.
Post sign-up engagement was closely monitored to ensure Teradata Interactive was reaching the right audience.
Through a combination of lead generation and improved data, The Science Museum Group was able to effectively target their active audience with the right message and increase engagement through segmented lead generation and targeted emails.
Results
Since partnering with Teradata the Science Museum Group has improved engagement levels by over 100%. In fact, newsletters sent using the newly acquired leads are currently outperforming the organic data on open rates by 24%, and by 30% on click rates.
Over a three month period, 10,000 leads were collected from three campaigns.
Open rates from the welcome email averaged at 32%, and click rates averaged at 6%, indicating the audience was highly engaged with the more targeted messages they were receiving.
Teradata Interactive was able to create a seamless relationship between the lead generation and CRM campaigns for The Science Museum Group, and also identified key audiences for them to target with their promotional messages.
Furthermore the Interactive team sourced like for like profiles to widen the reach dramatically, providing on-going optimisation.