DaxThink: Digital life

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is launching an email marketing campaign in a bid to recruit new members. The RSPB, Europe’s largest wildlife conservation charity, has selected online marketing agency Harvest Digital to manage the campaign following a three -way pitch, and appointed Bluestreak as the email marketing platform.

Harvest Digital has produced topical copy and engaging creative featuring stunning images of wild birds. With the strap line of ‘Saving birds, wildlife and the environment’, the first email emphasizes the effect of global warming on birds and wildlife and has a click through to the RSPB to join. The mailing also has news, including articles about RSPB reserves and helping garden birds to survive the winter, and an offer of fifteen months membership for the price of twelve.

Jo Coker, Direct Marketing Co-ordinator at the RSPB explains, “Signs the climate is changing are all around us - this year we have had one of the hottest summers on record. Erratic weather makes it even harder for many wild birds to survive. Birds are an important part of our ecosystem and a great indicator of the health of our planet so we need more supporting members to enable us to help them and their habitat. Email is an efficient way to reach potential supporters with a wealth of supporting information and a good offer. We selected Harvest Digital to manage the marketing because of their strategic direction and experience in the charity sector and Bluestreak because of their guidance on best practice, metrics and analysis.” Harvest Digital produced creative options, which were then split-tested by sending them to small segments of the database. Bluestreak monitored their performance for clicks, opens and the number of new members joining, and produced a custom report to decide on the most effective option. The email will be sent to the RSPB’s in-house database on the Bluestreak ionMX platform.

Mike Teasdale, Planning Director at Harvest Digital, comments, “We worked through a lot of potential email layouts as we wanted to maximize the amount of readable content that would display in the auto-preview pane. The test showed that the version with more content and a newsletter style generated more click-throughs, which validates our view of best practice of email design.”

Dax Hamman, International Operations Manager at Bluestreak comments, “We have tested the copy for spam-filtering and used our integrated ReturnPath tools to check the layout against 18 major email applications and ISPs to ensure the email is optimized for deliverability. Combined with the best creative from Harvest this will ensure higher open rates and click-throughs to sign ups.”

The roll out of email activity will commence this week.