Home to some of the UK's best-loved radio stations such as Heart, Capital and Classic FM, to name a few, Global keeps 25.4 million listeners tuned in and entertained each week.
We caught up with Kim Doan, Head of CRM, to discuss how Global manages email across some of the most popular brands in UK radio.
Before I joined at Global, email had been created manually. There were many templates in use, and often any updates we wanted to make had to be made at code level.
It took a long time to create email campaigns, which was a challenge as news in the entertainment industry changes often. We'd have to change content half way through making email, in order to stay up to date by the time we send. This manual process was not only time consuming, it was also costly.
After I joined we went through a process to move to a new central ESP, but before then email was made in various systems, often using editor tools that were difficult to use and sometimes weren't even supported anymore!
Now it's really easy for our team to make email. We have a full integrated Email Design System with a set of sub templates - one per brand, which have everything we need and are easy to maintain. The Email Design System was cleverly designed so that each sub template remains on-brand, with all the elements the team need to build their day-to-day emails from.
The CRM lead for each brand is responsible for putting the layout and content together in Taxi, but they work collaboratively with digital editorial and social teams who know the content in depth. It's quicker for us to make email, which means the content is fresher, and we also don't need to go into the HTML on a daily basis. We have a connector with Sailthru, our ESP, so once we're ready, we can export to there and hit the send button.
It's helped us increase productivity significantly, I'd say we've reduced creation time and effort by about 80%. A good indicator of this is when we host events like the Summertime Ball. Now we use Taxi, we can get all the content together from the party, and send the wrap up email on the same day as people go home.
The team is a lot happier now | they're still busy, but they get a lot of work done. They're more empowered to try out new ideas, and strive to send the best content we can.
We've been able to create more email | aside from regular newsletter-type content, we also send commercial and partner emails. Being able to make these easily has meant we can send more, and this has helped us generate a lot more revenue from the email channel.
In addition, we built more in-depth tracking into our templates in Taxi, so we have also been able to prove the value of email a lot more than we could.
Many of our brands | Heart is a good example | operate locally across the UK. Heart has 22 stations, so we've been able to send national campaigns, that also include content tailored for the recipient's local area. We also curate content based on engagement, and previous activity | being able to manage this in Taxi has helped us explore our options here.
Now that we have the day to day nailed, we have more time to look at pushing the boundaries with our campaigns. We're looking at adding some more creative flair to some key campaigns, particularly for some of our big events.
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The team at Global use Taxi for Email to make better email campaigns. Try Taxi for yourself at taxiforemail.com, and sign up for Global's emails at global.com/radio
Taxi for Email has increased productivity for the teams at Global Radio
Madelene Yeshin CRM Manager, Global Radio
