Member Article

House of Fraser Christmas ad generates highest email engagement levels – Return Path provides insight into retailers’ campaigns

Using its network of email data, Return Path has revealed how successful – or unsuccessful – email campaigns supporting the launch of some major retail brands’ Christmas TV adverts have been this year. In addition to the performance of the campaigns themselves, the analysis also considers whether there has been any form of post-launch “halo” effect for these programs. Extracting 10 weeks of campaign data running from the beginning of October to early-December, with the TV ad launches falling roughly in the middle of this period, Return Path examined the impact for John Lewis, M&S, Sainsbury’s, Boots and House of Fraser as they launched their Christmas TV adverts, identifying how many emails were opened, read and deleted. This insight provides a good indication of how retailers’ Christmas adverts have engaged with their audience.

The key findings are: • House of Fraser has enjoyed the highest email read rate during the Christmas period, with an indexed read rate of 113 (benchmark=100), followed by Sainsbury’s with 110. • The performance of John Lewis’ (102) and M&S’ (99) launch emails were broadly flat, while Boots significantly under-performed against the sender’s benchmark (92).

However, the performance of these 3 “lower performing” senders should be considered against a context of them sending to a large portion of their respective audiences (over 70%), while House of Fraser and Sainsbury’s both took more targeted/segmented approaches.

Guy Hanson, Senior Director of Professional Services at Return Path, has the following comments:

“Christmas adverts have become the most eagerly-awaited TV adverts of the year in the UK, with retailers under growing pressure to ‘win’ in the race to claim the hearts – and purses – of their viewers. This year, we have seen top brands tap into people’s sentimentality, romance and sense of fun, with adverts depicting family celebrations, a child’s imaginary friend and festive singalongs. John Lewis is often proclaimed to be the king of the Christmas ads, but is this still the case? If you look at how email subscribers engaged with these brands following the launch of their adverts, the answer is “possibly not!”.

“According to email data, House of Fraser had the highest email read rates following the launch of its Christmas advert, even though (or perhaps because) they were the last retailer to reveal their advert. One differentiator was this is the only sender that didn’t explicitly reference “Christmas Ad” in the subject line. This touches on a broader 2017 trend - adverts that implied references to Christmas with words such as ‘festive’, ‘sparkle’ and ‘advent’ actually generated higher read rates than those that explicitly referred to Christmas. This could just be down to subscriber fatigue, with Christmas promotions often starting in October – and well before Black Friday/Cyber Monday has even happened. But it could also be a reflection of a more secular Britain, where Christmas has decreasing resonance. We have observed a similar trend with other events with religious significance such as Easter, and even Pancake day!

House of Fraser also did another thing that the other retailers did not – it made clever use of the pre-header as a second subject line so that the total effect for recipients was: “Bring merry back this Christmas: Watch the Christmas advert”. Conversely, the two lowest performing launch emails (Boots and M&S) did not make use of a second subject line at all . Recent Direct Marketing Association (DMA) research shows that the subject line is one of the three most important factors that influence email opens, so this may have been a missed opportunity. “The timing of the launch of the Christmas adverts (in the second week of November) is also interesting, because all of the senders – bar M&S – then immediately launched into their Black Friday campaigns. The volume of Christmas email activity tripled after the adverts were launched, and this was then doubled by a similar volume of Black Friday/Cyber Monday traffic, so subscriber fatigue is a real risk. The twin impact of Black Friday and Christmas activity definitely creates a cannibalisation effect, with lower average read rates for both. Of the two, Christmas promotions performs slightly better than Black Friday promotions during this period, and then show a sharp upward bounce once Cyber Monday has passed.

“It was notable that M&S chose not to promote Black Friday at all, focusing purely on its Christmas-themed activities, and providing subscribers with inspiration in the form of promotions such as ‘The Great Gift Guide’. While Sainsbury’s did promote Black Friday, it took the interesting approach of merging the two, running a ‘Make Black Friday a bit more Christmassy’ campaign. It’s noteworthy that these senders were the only 2 not to see a post-launch decline in overall performance.”

“We’ve also seen other brands showcasing smart use of dynamic content in their Christmas ads. For example, Asda is using a Christmas countdown which refreshes when the email is reopened, whilst Norwegian Airways is running an email advent calendar with daily ‘reveals’ of prizes or special offers. This active, intuitive content adds an element of fun to the emails, which subscribers increasingly respond to, and both of these senders are seeing the benefit. In the case of Norwegian Airlines, the average indexed read rates for these emails are running at 176 (benchmark=100), while negative metrics such as deleted unread rates and spam filtering rates are much lower.”

“Sainsbury’s has also been running a highly engaging promotion, where consumers select their festive alter egos (“Chief of Christmas”, “Rushing Rudolf”, “Festive Fanatic”, etc.) and we are anticipating these selections will be used to inform the types of offers these customers receive during the festive period. Initial subscriber response has been highly positive, with read rates of up 70 percent higher than this sender’s benchmark.”

*Please note, where we have examined individual senders, the average performance metrics have been presented as benchmarks, and the individual variances are set against this benchmark (i.e. if we talk about an indexed Read rate of 110 then it was 10% higher than the benchmark – 100 - for the period). We defined “Christmas-themed” emails as all of the ones which could be identified as such (e.g. references to “Christmas”, “Xmas”, “Festive”, etc.). We also categorised each campaign by the way the theme was referenced, i.e. “Explicit” (“Christmas”) or “Implied” (“Festive”, “Mistletoe”, “Advent”, etc.)

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Return Path .