Warner Leisure Hotels achieves whitelisting with targeted email marketing

The Challenge

Warner Leisure Hotels is part of the Bourne Leisure Group which also owns Butlins and Haven Holidays.

To communicate with their customers, Warner had occasionally sent out mass promotional mailings which had created a drop in their inbox placement rates, causing Warner to fear being blocked by some ISPs.

In order to satisfy customers while getting their email delivered to the inbox, Warner Leisure Hotels needed to improve the way it communicated with customers and create a new email marketing strategy to improve sender reputation.

The Solution

RedEye, the leader in behavioural email, understands good reputation begins with a clean database and a targeted email marketing strategy. RedEye worked with Warner to produce a new email marketing strategy based on segmenting data and sending relevant and tailored email communication to improve deliverability.

The first part of the new strategy was to stop mailing inactive data and instead focus on the active subscribers. Removing inactive users helped improve Warner’s reputation as an email sender and allowed Warner to concentrate on the customers more likely to make a conversion.

Following on from this RedEye and Warner implemented a highly segmented email marketing programme concentrating on Warner’s active subscribers and customers. The process consisted of a range of automated behavioural emails including email sign up and basket abandonment. All emails were highly segmented based on user behaviour. This ensured each individual user received an email relevant to them, greatly improving the chances of the email being opened, read and clicked on.

With the improved strategy in place RedEye advised Warner to apply for the whitelist programme offered by Return Path. As a partner with Return Path, RedEye was more than aware of the benefits Warner would receive if they were accepted into Return Path’s Certification Programme.

The programme offered by Return Path is the industry’s largest and most widely used whitelist. It covers more than 1.8 billion mailboxes worldwide and is the most prestigious whitelist programme available worldwide. If accepted in Return Path’s Certification programme, Warner would receive improved inbox placement with hundreds of ISPs including Hotmail, Yahoo, Time Warner Cable, Road Runner, United Online, Mailtrust and Go Daddy. To be accepted, applicants need to prove they adhere to a high standard of email marketing practices.

As Warner was maintaining a clean database and implementing a new email marketing strategy of segmentation and automated behavioural emails RedEye was confident the company had improved their sender reputation enough to be accepted onto the Certification Programme.

Results

In addition to greatly improving their email marketing strategy, Warner was accepted onto Return Path’s Certification Programme, receiving whitelist status. This had an immediate impact on results. Delivery rates exceeded 99%, open rates increased by 10% and click through rates (as a percentage of delivered) increased by 24%.

RedEye has been working with brands across the Bourne Leisure group. These brands have now also been accepted into Return Path’s whitelist programme.