How Royal Mail Achieved a 45% Revenue Boost from a Smaller GDPR-Compliant Audience with Motiva Message Testing

Background

Royal Mail Group plc is a British multinational postal service and courier company, originally established in 1516 as a government department. The company provides mail collection and delivery services throughout the UK, serving all the inhabitants of the British Isles. They literally invented the postage stamp. [Source]

Challenge

When British Royal Mail completed their GDPR updates, the marketing team faced a new challenge: get better email results with a smaller audience. To meet this challenge, Robin Woolley, an email marketing executive, wanted to improve messaging on key campaigns to increase engagement and revenue generation.

Robin conducted a few experiments around sender persona, a.k.a. the From line, to see if the audience of his Stamps & Collectibles campaign would engage more if the email came from a person instead of the Royal Mail brand.

Solution

Robin chose Motiva’s automated Message Testing (MT) feature for Oracle Eloqua because it dramatically saves time compared to manual A/B testing and protects against unsubscribes.

Motiva’s MT can be configured on canvas in minutes as opposed to several hours for a manual A/B test. And MT is adaptive to protect against unsubscribes, meaning it quickly analyzes engagement rates for each version and removes low performing content that could result in contact fatigue.

Robin needed a solution that wouldn’t result in an even smaller audience.

Impact

After a few simple tests, Robin determined that the name of a colleague, Claudia, generated the highest engagement for the Stamps & Collectibles audience. So much so that email-generated revenue on the Stamps & Collectibles e-commerce site increased by a sustained 45%.

Motiva Message Testing paid for itself and more.

Expansion

Robin will continue using Message Testing to optimize email content. His next tests are focused on improving the unique clickthrough rate of key campaigns by testing other variables, including the language and tone around Call to Action buttons as well as content layout.

Want to see Motiva AI in action? Click below to schedule a demo.