PA Photos - Email Marketing Case Study

Sign-Up.to tripled the number of competition entries for PA Photos with a targeted email campaign to their customers. They received 3 times as many responses in one day, hitting 150 entries in just three hours!

"It's inexpensive, simple and makes our lives easier." Says PA Photos Marketing Manager Jenny Teasdale. "With Sign-Up.to, we were able to see exactly who has opened the email and who has clicked through in real-time. Not only that, we can see which links from an email are most popular, and this gives us an insight into which products are most interesting to specific customers. With this insight, we can further tailor our email marketing campaigns."

Jenny was running a caption competition to drive customers to engage with their pictures and to promote a show that they were exhibiting at. They launched the competition with an email to 4,000 customers using their in-house system and received around 50 entries. When a second email was sent they received another 50 entries, but many customers said they had not received the first email. "We weren't receiving bouncebacks to tell us the email hadn't been delivered. So, we assumed it must be landing in junk mail folders." Explains Jenny.

Many email marketing solutions PA looked at were too expensive and complex for their requirements and a colleague suggested Jenny approach Sign-Up.to for an evaluation. "Their service fitted well with our budget and email marketing needs and the team were very approachable, helpful and responded quickly to any queries we had. We were able to test the system instantly and the results spoke for themselves." Says Jenny.

After speaking to Sign-Up.to, Jenny was able to easily add their mailing lists to the system and upload the email with links through to their website. Five days before the competition was due to close, Jenny sent another email to customers who had not yet entered. They received 3 times as many responses in one day, hitting 150 entries in just three hours!

As a picture agency, it's vital for PA Photos to use imagery in every marketing email sent to their customers and Sign-Up.to enabled them to send image based emails that get through spam filters.

Sign-Up.to's web based solution can be accessed from anywhere and be used by all their marketing teams who are based in three different locations.

Sign-Up.to also enabled the sales team to follow up with customers more easily as they can see who opened the emails and clicked through to their website.

Before using Sign-Up.to PA Photos were using an in-house solution that had several problems. Firstly, it was not accessible from all locations, so the technical team had to be involved in uploading lists and sending test emails, which slowed and complicated the whole process. Secondly, they were having issues with deliverability and a significant percentage of customers were not receiving the emails. They also had no way to evaluate customers who opened the email and clicked through to the website.

Sign-Up.to solved all these problems for PA Photos and provided a cost effective and simple solution.

PA Photos is the photo agency of the Press Association Group, the UK's national news agency. Their award winning photographers respond to breaking news stories and capture the day's events and appearances, giving first class photographic coverage of UK news, sport and showbiz. Pictures are published worldwide every day, in print, online and on screen. PA Photos has an extensive online picture archive, with 5 million pictures at their fingertips and another 10 million offline. The archives date back to 1863 with around 20,000 new pictures added each week.

Jenny Teasdale is Marketing Manager at PA Photos and is responsible for maintaining the company's high profile and promoting the picture archive to their customers, and launching new products and services in the industry.

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www.paphotos.com