Hyper-personalised email campaign nominated for DDMA EMAS awards

The project

Deployteq’s partner Red Online Marketing, in collaboration with Storyteq, Studio Vi and Deployteq, sent a hyper-personalised email campaign to guests of De Kennemer Duincampings. The email was sent in Dutch, English and German and only to guests who stayed at Camping Bakkum, Camping Geversduin and Camping de Lakens in 2022.

Until recently, Kennemer Duincampings (KDC) sent a Christmas card at the end of the year thanking people for visiting the campsite. This could be considered old-fashioned and wasteful and not environmentally friendly; we wanted to change that. In terms of timing, they stuck to the end of the season and just before the start of the early bird season. Why? The Kennemer Duincampings wanted to take advantage of increased brand awareness around Christmas and during the early bird -season. To increase the likelihood of bookings. The email campaign used personalised animated-gif images. This campaign achieved a stunning result of a 43% higher click to open ratio than the benchmark average.

Solution

There is a hyper-personalised email developed based on collected data from guests on reservations in 2022. In this mail, a personalised salutation, text and animated-gif added. When clicked through, a personalised landing page was loaded with a fully personalised video.

Personalised fields
The personalised guest data [between brackets] in the video storyline:

• Dear [First Name],
• Think of yourself at home in [address]
• still remember your stay at [campsite]?
• Last year you slept [number of nights] during [year]
• in your tent, camper or caravan at [spot number].
• Will we see you again next year?

Studio Vi developed a landing page that could be reached via unique URLs from the personally sent emails. The landing page informed ‘What’s new in 2023 at the campsites’ for inspiration and to plant a seed to book in 2023.

Location personalisation

• Email subject line
• Personal animated gif in the email
• Personalised video on a personalised landing page after click-through

Result

The video went down very well amongst the audience! In best practice, personalised videos in an email are not always the best option, because videos make emails very heavy and not all email clients have video support. That can be detrimental for deliverability and send reputation. But, the open rate of this email campaign was 22% higher than the average open rate of this specific target group for the regular newsletters in 2022 from The Kennemer Duincampings.

The average click to open rate (CTO) came in 43% higher than the average CTO of this target audience in 2022. The CTO is the number of unique clicks within the email divided by the number of uniquely confirmed opens. This means that lots of people really wanted to see their personalised video. The video was primarily viewed on mobile (73%).

The feedback on the videos was great. The video lasted 42 seconds and was watched for an average of 53 seconds. In other words, some recipients re-watched (part of) the video. The completion rate (watching the entire video) is much higher than the benchmark, 44% better in fact!

Elise Menkveld, Email Automation Specialist at Red Online Marketing: “This case contributed to positive brand awareness and loyalty among guests just before the start of the early booking season. A tremendously beautiful project that I enjoyed working on. I am extremely proud of this innovative solution, from concept by Studio Vi and De Kennemer Duincampings to implementation in Deployteq by us. This nomination for the DDMA EMAS Award is really the icing on the cake!”.

Steven Bodoux, Creative Head of Marketing at De Kennemer Duincampings: “The campaign was doubly successful. We were able to let guests look back on their stay in a much more specific way AND we had the opportunity to showcase our new facilities for next season. Personalisation is now going to be used in multiple stages of the customer journey as well!”