P&O Ferries direct mail and email campaign

P&O Ferries is the UK’s largest ferry operator, with more than 10 million passengers carried every year across a range of routes to European destinations, including France, Holland, Belgium and Spain.

It makes extensive use of its website and email communications to stay in touch with its customers, encourage repeat business and identify new business opportunities.

The company needed to understand just how successful those communications were, and to achieve the optimum balance between the various channels it uses.

Typically, its early focus was to measure click through rates, online activity and booking activity, quite separately. However, they quickly realised that such measurement was not delivering the high level of understanding needed to optimise communications by individual customer.

According to one survey by econsultancy, over 43% of companies don’t know the true value of their email marketing. P&O Ferries was determined not to be one of them.

But how could they quickly develop an approach which would enable them to examine the impact of each of these channels both in isolation and as a part of a combined communication strategy?

First, a real understanding of what the email campaigns were delivering in real terms was needed - and what impact, if any, the other communications were having. Was there a positive impact on bookings at all? Were key customers actually being influenced to book, or not?

If so, which customers reacted best to which channels? Was it possible to gain a better return by mixing the balance of different communications? And what effect were other factors like frequency having on performance? Such questions needed answers to enable P&O Ferries to optimise its marketing.

To find how r-cubed used both direct mail in an integrated campaign to deliver impressive results, click the ‘download’ link below.