Company: Post Office
Entry submitted by: Darren Jones (Social Media Manager)
Social Channels: Twitter and Facebook
Lithy Category: Marketing Champion
With over 370 years of service, Post Office is the UK's largest retail network and the largest financial services chain in the UK with more branches than all of the UK’s banks and building societies put together. We also have growing direct channels such as contact centers and online - meaning they’re there for more customers, in more ways.
Post Office is now more than it ever was - an independent multi-channel business, with a vibrant, fast-growing financial services business and embarking on a new era of growth, modernization and customer excellence in serving the UK population.
Our unique promotion
In research, it was revealed that our customers had low awareness of Post Office's Sunday opening hours, and there customers had a negative perception of us as not being open around them. We were tasked with creating widespread awareness of Sunday opening hours. The strategy was to dominate Twitter for one day only with #LoveSundays, celebrating everything great about Sundays, from brunch to pajamas to Sunday dinner and - of course- Post Office's Sunday hours. Twitter was the perfect place to generate broad awareness and to engage our audience with the core campaign message.
Our strategy and tactics
Our strategy was shaped around using social media to help increase footfall into branches, increase sales of parcels/letters and overcome negative perceptions. The solution was to launch a #LoveSundays real-time marketing campaign, with a tiered content approach that focused on:
- Prepared: Aligned to people's Sunday activities and we ran mini competitions throughout the day encouraging user generated content.
- Reactive: We produced social content reactively when topics relevant to our customers were trending in order to increase the reach of our message, as well as offering real-time, personalized customer service by helping customers notice that their nearest branch is open on Sundays.
LSW helped us organize all the massive conversations into appropriate queues, as well as helping us to surface customer data- helping us to delivery personalised conversations, specifically:
- ‘Notes’ and ‘Conversations’– allowed us to quickly understand whether the person had talked to us before, which helped our operations team with background information.
- ‘Snooze’ - allowed us to go back to key influencers after the campaign.
- ‘Klout Topics’ - gave us a quick snapshot of the individual’s interests, which we used to try and tie back to the Sunday opening message. For example, if someone was interested in gardening, then this opened up the opportunity for us to reply to the customer with an “open around you” message about them visiting us before their Sunday trip to the garden center.
- ‘Klout Score’ - understanding this was helpful to amplify the campaign by giving us the opportunity to engage with those with a high influence quickly/in the moment, and in the process – encourage them to retweet (for example- when the Church of England tweeted).
- ‘Import’ - allowed us to import particular tweets from influencers, and participate in conversations – based on what was trending at the time, for example, The Open.
Our results
The campaign was extremely effective and we exceeded all of our campaign objectives and benchmarks in just one day:
Campaign objectives:
- Reach and awareness of Sunday openings core message.
- Hit social media engagement rates of 1.5% on Twitter
- Increase visits to the branch finder on PostOffice.co.uk.
- Increase volume and income in Mails category.
Results:
- Over 2 million impressions on Twitter.
- Average engagement rate of 6.01% on Twitter (way above benchmark).
- #LoveSundays trended organically, without paying for a Promoted Trend.
- 866% increase in branch finder page views versus previous weekend.
We also had several thousand more customers in the week immediately after #LoveSundays. Across web and in-branch it grew volume (7%), value (10%) and income (5%) for instant short term gain in trading.
The campaign highlighted the importance and effect that good quality customer interactions can have on amplifying a campaign and changing perceptions of a brand, just as much – or more - than broadcasting status updates. As such, we expect both teams (customer service and marketing) to be working much closer together for future campaigns, as well as upskilling our customer care agents with marketing skills, so they can spot more ‘moments’ to help amplify our corporate messaging within their replies.
For more, please visit https://storify.com/PostOffice/the-post-office-is-changing
