“Working with Touchbase Pro has been an absolute pleasure – their email marketing, customer service, training, and reporting are all excellent. Being based in Johannesburg, we have enjoyed one-on-one training, monthly meetings and quick access to their expert team. With their in-depth report system we have gained valuable insights into our audience interests. Their user-friendly platform has made it easy for us to produce high-quality content that our customers love.”
Kate MacWilliam, Digital Marketing Manager at Wilderness Safaris.
Wilderness Safaris is a safari operator, and they are dedicated to the conservation and restoration of Africa’s wildlife. Wilderness Safaris has been a client of TouchbasePro since July 2016 and has been working with their dedicated account manager since January 2018.
Executive summary
Wilderness Safaris needed assistance with their email marketing efforts, they wanted to
Communicate effectively,
Increase engagement
Create a more personal experience for the recipients
The database was segmented and a new newsletter layout was launched, with a very specific re-engagement campaign. After the launch of a re-engagement campaign, their email open rate increased by 
, after eliminating inactive users from their database, this figure doubled to 
.
Challenges faced by Wilderness Safaris
Wilderness Safaris did not have a centralised point for all their email marketing efforts, they had a large database with many inactive subscribers and their engagement was low.
They were sending blanket communications to their database of subscribers, with no personalisation and the hope that recipients were reading their newsletters. The email newsletter had no clear sections, calls to action, personalisation and it was not optimised for mobile.
Based on this, the goals for the engagement with TouchBasePro was to:
Increase engagement
Centralise email marketing efforts
Create a more personalised experience
How TouchBasePro Helped
A re-engagement campaign was launched with the main aim of getting inactive subscribers active again. A segment of inactive subscribers was created to target, using the existing base of subscribers. Inactive subscribers were given a gift to re-engage them. This meant that they were more likely to engage with emails from Wilderness Safaris due to the perceived value of the emails.
By running a series of these re-engagement campaigns, inactive subscribers could be eliminated from their database, and active and engaged subscribers identified for future communication.
Wilderness Safaris also started using personalisation in their subject lines as well as in the email content.
Emails with personalised subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened
Campaign Monitor
In the re-engagement campaign launched for Wilderness Safaris, each subscriber was thanked personally, giving the campaign a highly personal feel which results in higher engagement as each subscriber was made to feel that the emails were tailored just for them, resulting in a higher likelihood of future engagement with communication pieces from Wilderness Safaris.
Results
Following the series of re-engagement campaigns, the Wilderness Safaris newsletter open rate and click-through rate increased.
Their active users increased from 23.5% to a whopping 47.1% in 30 days. That is a 23.6% improvement in active vs inactive subscribers on their database, making their database a much more valuable future marketing tool for them.
The TouchBasePro team was able to increase these figures so drastically, as subscribers who wanted to receive communication and were engaged with emails, were now receiving them.
Segmentation was also done by sales agent, which allowed for the tailored content for the recipients of the emails.
This increased because we are now emailing subscribers who want to receive and engage with these emails
A few small technical changes were made on their newsletters to improve the user experience. Clear calls to action were introduced, the logo clicks through to their website, content was personalised and the layout was optimised for mobile so that the newsletters displayed all content in its intended fashion, on all devices.
Conclusion
With the introduction of the above changes to their existing email marketing efforts, Wilderness Safaris now has a database of engaged subscribers who want to read their emails. The marketing team has access to a dedicated account manager, who on a monthly basis provides them with business intelligence reports and gives them best practice advice, so that they can continue winning with their email marketing.
If you would like to find out how your email marketing efforts can be optimised, and how you can achieve the same results as Wilderness Safaris, get in touch with our Business Development team by calling us on 011 477 9716 or emailing us today.
PS We have some kickass coffee, so if you prefer you can pop around and we can chat over a cuppa.