Cheers to Our Marketer Quarterly Award Winners!

Woo Hoo! We’re thrilled to celebrate five of our clients whose email campaigns were chosen as winners in this year’s Marketer Quarterly Awards! The winning campaigns stood out from the crowd by using dynamic, personalized content in engaging and innovative ways to ensure their customers had the best possible experiences.

The Marketer Quarterly Awards recognize brands, their technology partners and agencies for being ‘the best of the best in email marketing’ in several different categories. Nominees are judged by analysts from The Relevancy Group on a variety of attributes including relevance, utilization of data, creative, strategy, and results, among other category-specific characteristics.

We’re honored to work with these clients, and excited to share their award-winning campaigns with you here today.

Best Loyalty Member Email/Offer – Ulta Beauty

ESP: Salesforce

Goals:

Ulta Beauty wanted to engage top loyalty members in an appealing email experience that promoted customer affinity and drove retention and growth.

Challenges:

Ulta’s ‘Year in Review’ emails were previously complex and labor intensive to build, and as one of the retailer’s more complicated campaigns, the coding for the ‘Year in Review’ email was highly detailed – so accuracy and thorough testing prior to deployment was crucial.

Solution:

The company partnered with Liveclicker to create a rich and engaging customer email experience using RealTime Email. With access to real-time customer data, the retailer was better able to capitalize on the opportunity that year-end emails present, all while streamlining the internal production process.

Results:

Ulta created an elegantly designed email that displayed five different points of personalization, highlighting key customer data points from the year, such as how much they’d saved and how many points they’d earned. Recipients spent nearly 3X the amount of time—close to 20 seconds—in the “Year in Review” emails as compared to the average Ulta email, and customers continued to open and engage with the email for days after it was deployed.

Best Retargeting – Busch Gardens

ESP: Silverpop

Goals of the campaign:

Busch Gardens Tampa Bay needed a better way to promote its annual Food & Wine Festival, which spans many weeks and features 18 different world-class concerts. More specifically, they were looking for an effective way to communicate a lot of complex information in an interactive and engaging way while incorporating specific interests of each guest into the campaign and ultimately, driving attendance and sales.

Challenges:

Traditional email marketing approaches made it difficult to convey so much information or give guests interactive options to learn more about a particular concert or purchase tickets in one email. They needed a way to deliver this much content in a way that is a good experience for the recipient, and to be able to offer the functionality for each of the 18 concerts and throughout the entire event campaign.

Solution:

Using Liveclicker’s add-to-calendar, Busch Gardens enabled recipients to add concerts to their personal calendars, and then was able to retarget guests who did with personalized reminders and CTAs to buy their seats and get their Festival Samplers.

Results:

CTRs beat Busch Gardens’ average by 150% and the campaign became the new template for other parks to replicate for similar events.

Best Use of Real-Time Data: Travel/Hospitality – Royal Caribbean

ESP: Salesforce

Goals of the campaign:

Royal Caribbean relies heavily on promotional messaging, and email remains one of the most effective ways to target prospective customers. The overall goal of this effort was to improve the customer experience with up-to-date pricing in email, increase engagement, and deploy accurate “BOGO 50” emails in a more timely fashion.

Challenges:

Inventory and pricing changes frequently in the travel industry, so ensuring that pricing in promotional emails matched pricing displayed on the website, while getting the emails out on time, was a challenge for Royal Caribbean – and even then, discrepancies could still occur.

Solution:

With Liveclicker’s real-time data, Royal Caribbean was able to populate pricing in their emails to make sure that they matched the prices displayed on the website whenever a recipient opened them.

Results:

Comparing unique click-through rates for this campaign with previous BOGO 50 campaigns, the results showed that subscribers engaged much more frequently on the itinerary with dynamic pricing changes. The campaign delivered a 12% increase in CTR versus the historical average. Also current and accurate pricing is available in email anytime a recipient opens the message, improving the customer experience.

Best Welcome Email/Email Series: Retail – Torrid

ESP: Salesforce

Goals of the campaign: To increase traffic both to the website and stores during its Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaigns, driving incremental revenue and achieving other aggressive goals for the holiday season.

Challenges:

Torrid needed to display up-to-date content to recipients at the precise moment they opened their emails.

Solution:

They designed the emails with a live image that also displayed a timer to count down to the end of each live promotion. Using open-time data, the hero image would disappear when the promotion expired, but was replaced by a message telling customers to visit the Torrid site to view “today’s amazing deals instead.”

Results: Torrid found these new emails led to new levels of customer engagement and urgency, both of which increased sales:

• Gained unexpected traffic and revenue spikes as countdown timers hit zero
• Achieved highest revenue hour in company history
• Significantly exceeded revenue goals
• Increased productivity of aged campaigns despite promotion expiring, with 37% of opens and a 3.6% click-through rate occurring after the sale ended

Best Use of Video – Alfred Dunhill Ltd

ESP: Cheetah Digital UK

Goals of the campaign: Dunhill wanted to improve the way it promoted its presence at the upcoming Fashion Week in Paris. Specifically, the luxury goods brand wanted to generate higher levels of interest and anticipation for the prestigious Men’s Fashion Show, and to give its audience a real-time look at the live event—and its latest fashions—using live-streaming video.

Challenges:

The Dunhill marketing team had many great ideas for creating a high-end, engaging experience, but didn’t have the necessary in-house developers or technical resources capable of adding advanced functionality to their emails.

Solution:

They partnered with Liveclicker to implement an elegant live video stream in email – an experience that would meet their goal, was perfectly aligned with their brand image, and impressed recipients with its capabilities. In the first email, Dunhill featured a trailer to build excitement. The next email featured a timer counting down to the pending live stream, later replaced by the live video. The last email contained the video recording, product images and CTA for more highlights.

Results: