English Heritage

The Membership Lifecycle is supported by a range of highly personalised campaigns at each stage, all delivered through FastStats and PeopleStage. Virtual variables are used extensively to specify site text and image details, define address details and to look at segmentation.

English Heritage makes use of virtual variables in FastStats to specify site text and image details so they can be amended quickly and easily. Utilising content free-text fields in PeopleStage also means that English Heritage could hard code parts of the data that are consistent for all members, such as the start of the image links, making the expressions easier to read and therefore manage. Virtual variables from an expression are used to define overseas addresses to ensure text is appropriate to location and virtual variables also look at segmentation, refined by member responses to surveys or lookalike responses if they have not completed a survey.

Since the recent improvements have been made email engagement metrics have increased significantly with click rates rising year on year. The additional personalisation across the programme has fundamentally changed the pattern of engagement with the communications: CTR remains high across the sends rather than immediately declining as previously, generating significantly more clicks over the cycle. Additionally, email engagers are driven to interact with the organisation across multiple touchpoints at a higher rate. One of the many benefits seen from this campaign is the application of customer attitudinal segmentation, used for most subsequent marketing activity. Results from this programme have been pivotal in cementing appetite within the organisation to roll out personalisation initiatives across their communications plan. They have further demonstrated that the organisation’s willingness to rely on data to drive business decisions is well-founded, as English Heritage have been able to continually prove that data, analytics and well-executed deployment of customer contacts has real benefit.