The Royal Ballet School achieves remarkable conversion rate increase with Dotdigital automation

The Royal Ballet School in London is an international centre of excellence for dance. It has developed a collection of online courses that inspire young dancers and supplement their training. These classes give a one-of-a-kind opportunity for dancers to explore and strengthen their ballet technique under the expert guidance of The Royal Ballet School teachers.

Replacing limited one-off campaigns with more impactful email marketing

To celebrate the first anniversary of its online classes, The Royal Ballet School wanted to reward people who had purchased lessons and encourage them to buy additional classes. It also wanted to diversify its sales and promote the uptake of classes which were not selling as fast.

To support these objectives The Royal Ballet School wanted to transform its approach to email marketing and move away from the limitations of one-off campaigns. To achieve this, the marketing team would take advantage of Dotdigital’s integration with their WooCommerce platform and its expertise in creating impactful email marketing automations.

Engaging customers with personalised product recommendations and incentives

To start the project, the marketing team used Dotdigital’s RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary) data expertise. Combined with the integration into WooCommerce, this enabled them to gain a deeper insight into the people who previously ordered classes. The results revealed a significant number of customers who had ordered three or more online classes, and this information was used to create a segment in Dotdigital.

The next step was to create an email marketing automation that would consist of an initial message offering 15% off the customer’s next online course purchase. This would be followed up with a reminder seven days prior to the expiry of the discount code, to those who had not yet made a booking.

Both emails also incorporated Dotdigital product recommendation blocks, which automatically populated each message with recommendations for the customer. Maddy Carroll, Audience and Insights Executive at The Royal Ballet School comments: “The product recommendation blocks have been invaluable in giving our marketing team greater efficiency and flexibility. It means they don’t need to create separate graphics for each class and we can switch the blocks easily, depending on what we are promoting.”

To maximise the success of the automation, the team used Dotdigital to run an A/B test to monitor and measure the performance of the subject line being used. “We wanted to assess whether expressly mentioning the size of the discount made a difference, or whether not to disclose it until the recipient opened the email,” adds Maddy Carroll. The results highlighted an 11% higher open rate when the 15% offer was stated, but a 2% lower click-to-open rate. “This ability to test has given us insights that we can use to develop new messaging around our offers and discounts,” adds Maddy Carroll.

Increased opens rates and class purchases demonstrates the power of always-on automation

The email marketing automation has been a success, generating additional revenue through increased purchases from existing customers, with minimal ongoing effort required from the marketing team once activated. The initial offer email averaged an open rate of 77% and a conversion rate of 6.2%, whilst the reminder returned similarly impressive results with a 72% open rate and 3.8% conversion rate.

These metrics are significantly higher than the results of the one-off campaigns, representing an increase of 40% for open rates, and a staggering 3000% in the conversion rate. “This project has proven to us the power of an ‘always-on’ email marketing automation,” concludes Maddy Carroll.