QVC

The challenge

At QVC, customers can choose between different newsletter formats, including the daily offer mail sent out every day. However, the proportion of recipients who do not interact with the mailings or send them unread to the wastepaper basket was growing steadily. To turn these inactive recipients back into active openers, QVC brought Optimizely's Business Consulting on board. The collaboration was an obvious choice, as the company had already been using Optimizely Campaign for its email marketing for a long time.

With Optimizely Campaign, we were not only able to win back our inactive recipients, we can now also write to them automatically at the right time. This allows us to create increased and qualitative customer loyalty in the long term. We also benefit from the reduced time required thanks to automated campaign management and extensive monitoring and analysis functions.

Tatjana Birmele Retention Marketing Specialist QVC

Retention Marketing Specialist, QVC

The solution

QVC planned a two-stage reactivation campaign with Optimizely in the period from January to June 2020. The aim of the campaign was to encourage inactive recipients to open QVC mailings again and interact with the content - without incentives such as vouchers or competitions.

At the start of the campaign on January 28, 2020, all recipients who had not opened any mailings from QVC in the last 90 days were initially recorded. They did not receive any further newsletters for the next 14 days so that the recipients' inboxes remained free of QVC newsletters for this period to allow more exposure for the kick-off mailing. Only then did the reactivation start with a kick-off mailing with the subject line “Do you want to open this mail...? 😲”. The email itself contained an image personalization with the recipient's first name as well as missed offers, specials, sales and other benefits from which the user could benefit even without incentives. The highlight: a central “call-to-action” button led the recipient to the QVC Preference Center. There they have the opportunity to adjust their profile data and select their preferred newsletter formats.

In the next step, a follow-up mailing was sent seven days later with identical content but the subject line “Do you know what we think about you?” to those recipients who had not opened the initial mailing. The adapted subject line was intended to encourage recipients to open the mailing.

At the end of the campaign, all reactivated recipients, i.e. those who interacted with one of the mailings by opening or clicking on it, were transferred back to regular communication. They now receive the usual QVC newsletters again. Recipients who are still inactive are automatically excluded from regular mailings.

The results of the campaign kick-off are impressive. 25.22 percent of the previously inactive recipients were motivated to engage with the QVC mailings again in this way. QVC also recorded an impressive click-to-open rate of 25.76 percent and an unsubscribe rate of less than one percent.