IPC Media, which owns brands such as Horse & Hound, InStyle and NME appointed Experian CheetahMail to revitalise its email marketing operations and its 40 editorial newsletters. Marketing emails had previously been managed and distributed by a third party company and IPC handled its newsletters with an in-house system that lacked reporting effectiveness.
Experian CheetahMail worked in partnership with IPC over 12 months to develop a multi-channel service to improve the media company’s return on investment from its email marketing. By refreshing and fine-tuning IPC’s data and maximising the use of subject lines, dynamic content, segmentation and personalisation, Experian CheetahMail achieved strong results:
• Subscriptions to IPC’s email newsletters increased almost 60%, from 1.2 million to 1.9 million in 12 months
• Bounce rate for deliverability has been reduced from 5% to 0.5% over three years due to Experian CheetahMail’s relationships with global ISPs
• IPC can now send 20 million permission-based emails per month, compared with three million, 12 months ago
• For its NME brand, personalisation in subject lines and shorter subject lines increased open rates by 20%
• Improved reporting across all IPC brands to the benefit of the company as a whole
For IPC, key to the success of the partnership was ensuring that the service was easy to use. Experian CheetahMail developed a bespoke programme to train an initial 36 ‘super users’ across IPC’s brands who worked alongside Experian CheetahMail’s client team. In addition, it provided online resources for IPC’s email marketers to help them develop their skills as the new system rolled out. As a result, IPC is now largely self-sufficient in its use of the system, but has a dedicated account team at Experian CheetahMail should they require it.
Lee Wilmore, Head of Database Marketing, IPC Media said: “Using Experian CheetahMail has revolutionised our editorial newsletters and email marketing campaigns. When we run tests we can now see increases to open and click rates as they happen, leading to increased ROI and learnings we can share across the entire business.
“It’s sped up the process of running an email campaign and gives control to each individual user over how they want to manage and schedule their workload. Experian CheetahMail also provides the necessary level of user friendliness. Our process for a new user is that they sit down for 45 minutes in front of it and then they’re pretty much ready to go.”
Avis Easteal, General Manager, Experian CheetahMail UK & Ireland, said: “Email is a powerful tool in a marketer's armoury and IPC Media’s results show the business benefits of getting email marketing right. This campaign demonstrates Experian CheetahMail’s ability to deliver compelling results across a complex multi-brand business. We have provided IPC with a robust platform that supports email but has the potential to also embrace mobile and social networking. Using our experience and insight, we are working on a series of campaigns for brand name clients that enhance their customers’ experience and improve the deliverability of their marketing campaigns.”
IPC has further plans to work with Experian CheetahMail to gauge customer satisfaction via its Net Promoter Score survey. The results of which will help the company trigger emails during a subscriber’s lifetime, driving cross-sales, customer loyalty, advocacy and insight. Experian CheetahMail is also supporting IPC with a move to one single IP network, which will further increase email deliverability by optimising its reputation with ISPs. Further planned developments include implementation of a service that triggers an email acknowledgement as soon as a customer buys or renews a subscription online.
