Welcome to the final installment of the Ashop blog series on target marketing email campaigns. In the last two posts we’ve discussed how to construct effective emails using text, images, and smart scheduling. Today we’ll be discussing the merits of famous targeted advertising email campaigns undertaken by affluent and recognizable companies. Let’s jump right in with
our first example.

British Airways

As we discussed in our first post, tracking customer data and recognizing trends in their behavior is a vital part of accurate target marketing. British Airways did a spectacular job of illustrating this point with one of their email campaigns.

To advertise an exclusive mobile application to their Loyalty club members, they tracked several different important sales metrics among their users in an effort to create the perfect customer profile. They built a very specific picture of the customer they were trying to target by doing the following:

• Discovering what loyalty club customers were using mobile devices.
• Determining which devices they were using.
• Developing 4 different emails optimized for each device individually.
• Detailed more consumer habits and further tailored the email content.

With these metrics they gathered a list of highly specified loyalty club members who were most likely to open the emails from their mobile devices, and then clickthrough to the company landing page. The results of this campaign were astonishing.

Android and iPhone users who received the email opened it more than 50% of the time. After opening the message clickthrough rate exceeded ¼ of the total users on iPhone and approximately a third of all Blackberry users.  These are by no means ordinary results. If nearly half of targeted customers are opening a company’s emails, that’s an incredible success.

The emails advertising the Executive club mobile application directly resulted in over 250,000 downloads and over 70,000 clickthroughs to the British Airways website. The campaign was so successful that the company is now planning another multilingual campaign based on the same template.

So to what do they owe their success?

• Attentive and intelligent analysis of their tracked metrics
• Individual optimization for specific devices
• Attractive and clickable imagery in the emails

Here are a couple of screen shots for the email and its corresponding landing page:
Note the identical color schemes on the landing page, which complement the email perfectly. This harkens back to the importance of imagery we discussed in the last post. Everything in the email looks smooth and unhurried. There is also no wasted real estate on the iPhone email. Every inch is covered in either text describing the benefits of the application, or pictures illustrating the sleek and stylish imagery of the app itself.  All of which works in perfect harmony with the landing page.

This email campaign is a perfect example of the power that goes along with paying attention to your customer’s browsing habits on an ecommerce site. The campaign nearly doubled its targeted rate of application downloads, offered its high value customers some advanced notice on useful content, and built for itself an entirely new base of advertising operations through its mobile application. As far as success stories go, you’d be hard pressed to find one more compelling than that.

Expedia.com

When travel website standout, Expedia, was looking to expand its business in the Pacific Asian region, the decided on an efficient and optimized targeted email campaign that drew upon some of the concepts we’ve already discussed, and at least one that we haven’t.

They began by examining user data in that region to divine browsing habits, but where the novelty comes in is through their topographic efforts. They delivered weekly newsletters to their customers in different sub-regions with geographically specific offers.

In other words, they examined which offers were getting more clickthroughs in certain areas, but still weren’t converting. So to incentivize these attractive offers that for whatever reason just weren't converting, they made special offers around those packages. In this way, they managed to turn user interest into profitable sales.

These geographically inspired efforts were made more thoroughly effective by the use of intelligent scheduling. The weekly repetition of Expedia offers to these specific customers, who were already showing a lot of interest on Expedia’s website, served to reinforce the desire for travel, and ended up converting potential customers in high volumes.

This smart strategic play bodes well for Expedia’s future. Any web service that pay attention to customer habits, and therefore customer wants and needs, stands an excellent chance of predicting their future behavior. Understanding your clients is the first step to providing them with a better product or service, which in turn leads to higher conversions, and more money in the company coffers.

Hopefully, our look into big-time successful email campaigns has served as a window into the billionaire empire mindset. This is the final post in the Ashop series of blogs concerning targeted advertising using email campaigns.

Follow the strategies outlined in this series to a “T” and you’re virtually guaranteed to have a successful campaign of your own.  So start paying attention to customer behavior and specify your targeted marketing messages and you can begin to create conversions for yourself.

And if you’re in need of a quality metric tracking system for your online store, be sure to sign up for Ashop’s free 10 day trial.