World Society for the Protection of Animals Increases Donations With Personalised Email Campaign

LONDON -

- Organisation Improves Email Performance, Saves Time Using ExactTarget’s Automation Tools

The World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) (www.wspa.org.uk/), the world’s largest alliance of animal welfare societies, has increased online donations by nearly 50 per cent with a new campaign powered by on-demand email and one-to-one marketing solutions provider ExactTarget.(www.exacttarget.co.uk/)

The animal protection organisation, which has offices based in 14 countries around the world, posted the results after it refined its email marketing effort by offering unique cause-related content to advocates, inviting them to donate to support a specific cause.

“We can use subscriber preferences to create groups and send specific messages around an issue to individuals that have responded to calls to action regarding a certain topic or issue. The real labour-saving element here is that only one email is required,” said Daniela Martino, WSPA’s international communications manager. “Using ExactTarget’s dynamic content feature, we can automatically build emails based on a person’s interests. It allows us to engage with our subscribers in a more personal and emotive manner; something which is absolutely vital given the highly emotive subject matter that forms the basis of our work.”

WSPA’s email marketing campaigns invite animal protection advocates to sign up online, to receive email newsletters about certain causes or animal welfare issues. The newsletters also encourage subscribers to contact government leaders, sign a petition or donate to support their cause. Using ExactTarget’s list segmentation tools, (email.exacttarget.com/Products/ExactTargetFeatures/AdvancedContentMa nagement.html) WSPA groups email subscribers based on causes, donations and advocacy, and builds emails featuring news and information related to their interests. WSPA also uses ExactTarget to power an email marketing programme that directs existing regular donors to an ExactTarget-powered landing page(email.exacttarget.com/Products/MessagingChannels/MicrositesAndLan dingPages.html) where all of the subscriber’s information is automatically populated and a higher value donation amount recommended. Once submitted, the donation information is fed back into ExactTarget’s database to refine future messages to subscribers.

“Before we started working with ExactTarget we were only able to build and track email campaigns focused on soliciting donations,” said Martino. “Today however we can deliver very tailored messages to subscribers in every country based on their behavior and the issues they support, and we can do it quicker than we could before because of the automation and segmentation available in ExactTarget.”

WSPA plans to continue refining its one-to-one communication efforts with the addition of ExactTarget’s integrated SMS text messaging (email.exacttarget.com/Products/MessagingChannels/SMS.html) later this year. This will allow advocates to subscribe to its email newsletters and sign petitions via text messaging and the planned addition of ExactTarget’s Social Forward (email.exacttarget.com/Products/ExactTargetFeatures/SocialForward .html) technology to its messages will allow subscribers to share content with up to 50 social network sites including Twitter and Facebook.

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Subscribers Rule UK!

ExactTarget is today launching its SUBSCRIBERS RULE UK! initiative at Ad:Tech. The new initiative, designed to help UK marketers create customer-focused marketing campaigns like those successfully implemented by WSPA, includes a blog, WWW.SUBSCRIBERSRULE.CO.UK that will feature “man on street” interviews discussing current UK email marketing practices, SPAM and customer preferences with UK consumers.

The blog will also feature advice for UK marketers on how to leverage email and other one-to-one communication channels such as text messaging and social media to optimise relationships with their most loyal customers.

“By talking with UK customers directly, we’ll hear first-hand the challenges they face when communicating with companies and organisations via email, text messaging, social media and other one-to-one marketing channels,” said Peter McCormick, general manager of ExactTarget Global in London and co-founder of ExactTarget. “We’ll share those challenges on our blog and create a conversation to help UK marketers achieve value from the process of putting subscribers first.”

The concept of customer-centred communications is a foundational philosophy of ExactTarget called SUBSCRIBERS RULE, McCormick said. The philosophy consists of three tenets:

- Serve the individual - Honour their unique preferences with regard to communication, content, frequency and channel - Deliver them timely, relevant content that improves their lives

Source: ExactTarget