Relevance and targeting boost Centaur's email engagement

Centaur is a leading UK based business information, publishing and events group. It runs more than 20 exhibitions annually, including the National Home Improvement Show (NHIS): the UK’s leading event for home improvers. The Goal The marketers for NHIS wanted to find a way to engage more of their pre-registered subscribers and increase the number of click-throughs to their website, and ultimately also the number of people attending the show. The Challenge The registration process for NHIS collected a wealth of specific information. The key to increasing recipient engagement lay in using this data effectively. As email is the primary channel for communicating with pre-registrations, an innovative campaign was required to encourage them to engage with the show, and turn up on the day. The Strategy Adestra’s consultants worked with NHIS marketers to find the best way of using the information they had collected. The strategy they came up with was to segment that data to send more personalised information to their subscribers. For example, the specific part of the house they were looking to improve. These house categories then linked up with the exhibitor list categories so that they could push visitors towards the right exhibitors and products before the show. Using Adestra's MessageFocus functionality, dynamically personalised emails including pre-registrations' information were then sent to engage the visitors before the show. The email template created by Adestra could render up to 196,608 different possible combinations - all driven by the pre-registered visitors self-selected demographic information. The Result This highly relevant and targeted campaign received a 43% open rate and an astonishing 34% of openers then clicked through to their website. This was achieved by delivering relevant content, based upon self-selected recipient criteria – a critical part of this specific event's marketing set-up. Adestra and Centaur are both AOP members.