2018 Awards Preview – Most Effective Messaging Campaign

Ahead of our 2018 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, well be previewing the nominees in each category, giving you a glimpse at the high quality of entries weve seen this year. In today’s preview, we look at the best uses of messaging and push notifications to engage consumers.

BBC News and Urban Airship – Royal Wedding Weekend BBC News Rich Notifications
Around 24m people in the UK watched the wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle on 19 May. The BBC covered the event on broadcast television as well as online and on mobile through its news app, which uses notifications powered by Urban Airship. But the BBC and Urban Airship realised that not all of the app’s users would want push notifications about the event, so an initial alert was sent inviting users to opt in to receiving extra news on the wedding. Each subsequent notification to those who opted in included an ‘Unfollow’ button, making it easy to unsubscribe from the wedding notifications.

Two per cent of the BBC News app audience responded to the interactive notification campaign which is four times higher than the media industry’s average engagement rate of 0.5 per cent. 300,000 of those who interacted with the notification chose to receive the extra notifications.

An analysis of BBC News’s notifications sent to this targeted segment compared to broadcast (untargeted) Royal Wedding notifications from five similar UK news organisations showed that BBC News’s strategy achieved a direct open rate across the campaign of 13 per cent, which was more than 4 times higher than the other news outlets’ notifications average engagement rate. The best performing notification for BBC News achieved a 30 per cent direct open rate which is extremely high for apps from any industry, especially media. The campaign also had an extremely strong retention rate, with only 12 per cent of users choosing to unfollow the extra notifications throughout the day of the wedding.

Britvic (Pepsi Max), Weve and OMD – Maximum Taste. No Sugar. Simple
For this campaign, Weve partnered with Pepsi to enhance its Pepsi Max Taste Challenge campaign for its second year. In summer of 2017, Pepsi ran the first Pepsi Max Taste Challenge where it asked shoppers to pick their favorite out of Coke, Pepsi reg and Pepsi Max in a blind taste test. This original activity was heavily led by experiential, POS and secondary selling space and ran in Tesco main estate stores only. In 2018, the Pepsi Max Taste Challenge would also take place in Tesco Express stores – unlocking more locations, but meaning the format changed due to space restrictions. In this format, it was about challenging consumer perceptions and driving trial of Pepsi Max by connecting to the shopper pre-store and then converting with a price promotion and secondary selling space in store. This meant Weve had a significant role to play in raising awareness and connecting with shoppers pre-store, ensuring they converted and assisting in driving traffic in-store. Ultimately, the goal was to deliver a significant sales uplift and positive ROI results.

Weve used contract-verified age and gender data to target 18+ males and females with 100 per cent accuracy. Weve built an audience of those residing within a 5-10 minute drive time from select Tesco Express stores. But, driving people in store at a particular time is no easy feat so Weve’s creative strategy had to be simple and effective to cut through. Weve Messaging was used to deliver messages direct to users’ phones.

The SMS drove through to a personalised store locator where users could find their nearest Tesco Express store. Weve also built a simple MMS to accompany the message and drive high impact awareness without distracting from the store locator.

The campaign drove significant uplift in sales of the featured product – Pepsi Max 1.5L – as well as the wider Pepsi Max range, and in the wider overall cola category, proving the old adage that keeping things simple really does work.

E.On and Urban Airship – Mobile Engagement Campaign
E.On aim on mobile is to create experiences with customer needs at their heart, enabling customers to interact with it when and where is best for them.

Working with Urban Airship on its mobile app, E.On sought to increase meter read submissions, boost interest in new boiler offerings, gain more customer feedback, and recruit customers to its Alexa skill beta programme.

To get users submitting their meter readings, E.On setup custom event tracking, targeting users who had forgotten to finish the task with notifications – similar to what some retailers do with abandoned baskets. Meanwhile, to drive interest in new boilers, it A/B tested push notifications – with users who clicked through being taken to a landing page where they could setup a free home survey for their boiler.

Elsewhere, E.On sought customer feedback through an interactive push messaging campaign aimed at boosting app store reviews and collecting feedback on the app experience. And Alexa skill beta participants were recruited through a combination of push and message centre notifications, driving 4,000 signups.

During the campaign, E.On’s message centre pages had  read rates as high as 35 per cent, while message centre reminders resulted in a 23 per cent conversion rate from the rich page views.

“Our innovative mobile engagement strategies have positively impacted our business goals and objectives and most importantly — have helped us create an app that drives value for our customers,” said Daniel Stevens, digital experience manager at E.On.

France Televisions and Urban Airship – 2017 Elections: Franceinfo App
France Televisions wanted to be the first media organisation in France to deliver real-time personalised election results during last year’s French elections.

It wanted to use its Franceinfo app to send the results via push notifications immediately after the 8pm embargo, which is imposed on media organisations by French law, lifted. On top of this, France Televisions wanted to deliver personalised notifications based on the user’s choices of ‘region’, ‘department’, and ‘municipality’.

France Televisions worked Urban Airship to deliver these real-time personalised election results to users. In order to do this, the pair enabled users to choose from 13 regions, 101 departments, and over 35,000 municipalities – of which they could choose multiple – to receive results from within the Franceinfo app. These selections could be managed within the app’s notification centre, and users could choose to opt-in or opt-out of receiving notifications.

By using Urban Airship’s automation and segmentation, each user received only the election notifications that were relevant to them. When the 8pm embargo lifted, users were sent the personalised results of the election in real-time.

France Televisions was the only media outlet to deliver real-time, personalised notifications during the elections. The results of the campaign were presented for the judges’ eyes only.

Lane Bryant and Vibes – Swipe to Reveal Campaign
Plus-sized fashion retailer Lane Bryant needed to adjust its marketing strategy in order to keep up with advancing technology. So, it partnered with Vibes to build a customer-centric marketing strategy and produce an elevated shopping experience.

Instead of just firing out coupons and promotions, Lane Bryant added a gamification element to its traditional promotions. Its first gamified experience, ‘Swipe to Reveal’, launched in July 2017 promoting the retailer’s Cacique lingerie collection.

Mobile subscribers received an SMS message, showing a model wearing a dress, with instructions to ‘swipe’ to reveal an offer of $15 off the bra the model was wearing.

The campaign resulted in a 49 per cent engagement rate and a 37 per cent mobile wallet download rate. It, along with Lane Bryant’s other mobile marketing efforts, grew the retailer’s mobile subscriber list by 30 per cent in the first six months of working with Vibes – 16 points greater than the growth exhibited by other retailers during the same period.

McCain Foods, Weve and Capture – Motivating Mums Down the Frozen Aisle with Mobile Data
Launching a new product in the grocery market is no easy feat, with the average shopping faced with 30,000 products in store. When launching its new Sweet Potato Wedges, McCain partnered with Capture and Weve to create a data-driven plan designed to target the crucial audience of mums under 45, combining demographic, behavioural and location data to generate a granular audience.

Beginning with Weve’s verified and consented data, the team drilled down to target mums using age and gender information combined with behavioural data. Next, the team overlaid Morrisons’ store data to compare which stores had higher-performing frozen goods products compared to the average store, and identified target consumers living within one mile of selected stores.

The campaign saw an 18.8 per cent uplift for Sweet Potato Wedges during the campaign period, with a long term 17.1 per cent uplift, almost five percentage points above the frozen category benchmark. In terms of ROI, the campaign impacted not just Sweet Potato Wedges but the entire McCain frozen potato line, and with a clear uplift in the post-campaign period, the results indicate that those targeted a likely to buy again after trialling the product.