Once a year, a leading email platform called Adestra holds a competition for “Email Campaign of the Year”. It’s a national award with only 12 carefully selected campaigns in the runnings for the coveted title.
NB: The results, screenshots of the winner and features of the winner are included here
Adestra is one of the biggest email platforms in the UK (alongside Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor and Vertical Response) and they’re branching out globally too. The companies who use Adestra put out tens of thousands of email campaigns, going to millions of customers/consumers every year. That makes for big competition in this award.
Of all of these campaigns, a lucky 12 are selected and put into the campaign of the year award. This year (2016), the finalists included some huge household name brands, including Russell Hobbs, Wyevale Garden Centres, Reader’s Digest and Evans Cycles.
Adestra Campaign of the Year 2016 results
- Stoke Park
- Spin Life
- Historic England
- Reader’s Digest
- Crabtree & Evelyn
- Evans Cycles
- Reservation Counter
- Russell Hobbs
- Wyevale Garden Centres
- Sheerluxe
- Breast Cancer Care
- Meteor Electrical
The 2016 Adestra campaign winner
The winner, Meteor Electrical, is little known comparatively to others in the top 5. The win is largely thanks to the complexity of the email but also to the results it gave. For example, the open rate was 117% higher than typical newsletters and returned £106 per re-engaged customer.
The campaign is a “trigger” email. Meaning you set it up once, make sure you have a regular data feed into it, then sit back and relax. No further effort required.
Features of the Meteor email
(Items in bold indicate dynamic content, generated through some fancy coding, based on an automated customer database generated by their website):
- Dynamic and interactive menu – Click an icon on mobile and a menu appears seamlessly
- Dynamic subject line – “Happy 6th Anniversary, John“
- Dynamic text over a hero image (just below the menu) – “6 year anniversary”
- Dynamic date since the customer created an account – “It’s been 6 years since you created an account”, “Maybe you remember creating your account back on 14th February 2011?“
- Dynamic images – The blue image that reads “6 years” just beside the birthday candles
- Dynamic text to display number of orders the customer has placed, and where they’ve placed the most orders – “Since then you’ve placed one order on our website. Well, a few clicks are easier than visiting a shop!“. If the customer had placed 3 orders in total, 2 of which were over the phone, it would show “Since then you’ve placed one order on our website and two orders over the phone. Who doesn’t like speaking to a friendly voice!“
- Dynamic date since they last visited the website – “The last time you visited us and logged into your account was 24 December 2016“
- Dynamic date since last purchase, and a relevant follow up message relating to the length of time – “It’s been over 24 months since you last placed an order. Maybe our offer below can persuade you to come back?“. If the order was, for example, 2 weeks ago: “It was only 2 weeks ago since you last placed an order. We’re were pleased to see you again. As a thank you, we have a special offer for you below“
- Dynamic promotion code – “LQYUQ2LH“. That was the easy one to do, just as easy as “John“
- Dynamic promotion code end date – “Expires 3rd March 2017 23:59:59″
- Mobile responsive (of course)
The developer of the Adestra campaign of the year winner
One of Digital Peanut’s very own (who is currently being rewarded with ridiculous volumes of coffee and sweets) developed the email at his previous company. It took the email guru well over 20 solid hours of head scratching and complicated coding to get it to work, but the hard work paid off. It’s a massive achievement and a testament to the level of skill required to make something like this work.
Without further ado, and because you’re all dying to see it, here’s the email in question.
Desktop version
Mobile version
