Campaign of the Month

University of Birmingham intrigues subscribers with their promotional subject line and animated festive email

University of Birmingham achieved an impressive open rate of 52%.

Brand: University of Birmingham | Conferences and Events

Campaign creation by: Kat Warder Morrison, Susie Day, Michelle Lane and Steven Bister

Website: www.birmingham.ac.uk/conferences-and-events

Campaign details

Subject line: Five days of free Christmas gifts starts…NOW!

Opens: 52%

Context

Founded in the 19th century in Birmingham, UK, the University represented a new model for higher education. Situated in a large, diverse city students from all religions and backgrounds were accepted and equality was strongly demonstrated.

The University’s conferences and events team manage a portfolio of venues which they maintain all year round. With a commitment to professional service inspiring everything they do, the team decided to up their game with this year’s festive email campaign and challenge their subscribers to engage with the content more creatively. This, in turn, was intended to increase their database and quality of engaged customers.

What data was used?

The conferences and events team sent the campaign out to a combination of their existing database and a list of people who had signed up specifically to the seasonal campaign.

Objectives

  • Drive clicks using the ‘I feel lucky’ button
  • Engage subscribers and achieve a high open rate using an intriguing promotional subject line
  • To create a consistent journey for subscribers directing them to dedicated landing page from the email
  • Get subscribers to sign up to future emails
  • Improve brand loyalty and increase top of mind effect

What makes this a performing campaign?

University of Birmingham incited their subscribers by using an intriguing subject line and personalization in order to get their audience interested in their seasonal campaign. This day one of a five-day giveaway promotion is based around the traditional British Christmas pudding.

Each day’s campaign uses an entertaining animated gif to intrigue contacts into clicking around and through the campaign to see whether they are one of that day’s winners. The consistency of this journey from email to landing page ensured ease of navigation for subscribers, generating an impressive click through rate of 85%. The client also used Adestra’s form builder for the form submissions, alongside building the campaign within the Adestra Email Editor.

The results

The acquisition work leading up to this campaign and pre-promotion, combined with great list quality, has enabled University of Birmingham to achieve an impressive open rate of 52%. 204 people subscribed to this campaign, and 98 of those went on to subscribe to the University’s conferences and events newsletter. This increased the entire database by 48%, marking a real success for the organization.