St Martin-in-the-Field Trust
St Martin-In-the-Field Trust handles all fundraising for London’s historic landmark, St Martin’s church, which is nestled right in the heart of Trafalgar Square.
“Here at St Martin-in-the-Fields, we’ve been working with Alex at Maybe Later on an email and data audit. She's guided us through a project that had begun to feel overwhelming. We have a practical plan to work on in the short, medium and long term. And we're already seeing the benefits of her advice and wisdom. Our recent winter email campaign has done really well. We have a healthier email list (and routes to improving health!), and email engagement is improving.
Alex is a joy to work with - she knows email, she loves email, and now we do too”
Lisa Cullen, Stewardship and Development Manager at St Martin-in-the-Fields
Each year St Martin-in-the-Field launches a big, headline appeal, and their data needed to be in peak health in order to get the best results possible. While the team knew that their data was in-need of a major clean up, the job just seemed a little too big and overwhelming for a busy team in the midst of serious campaign planning.
So, that’s when Maybe Later stepped in.
It was important that any solutions didn’t add more volume to the team’s existing workload, so three phased projects were scoped out to solve their data problems and improve their knowledge of and confidence with the Mailchimp platform. Project management needed to be punchy and easy to access, so weekly meetings were held to get everyone up to speed on developments and discuss next steps, rather than relying on a project management software, like Trello, which just didn’t quite fit with their existing way of working.
Before diving into tactical delivery, the first step was to get a real-time understanding of the state of their email data, discover which pieces of content were driving results and re-define audience segments to engage with the appeal. After there was a shared understanding of the current data situation, I cleaned the lists and provided a clear, manageable to-do list, with each email task broken down into short, medium and long-term actions. This gave the team a place to start, and a goal to aim for, and empowered everyone to take small, consistent steps as a team while avoiding getting overwhelmed in the process.
Once the foundations were in place for the appeal to thrive, the next step was to work together on a segmentation project which sent automated emails based on the interests and preferences of their target audiences. This approach will always generate the best results, so I set up self-selecting groups in MailChimp so all new subscribers could share the parts of the charity that they were most interested in. This allowed the team at St Martin-in-the-Field to get to know their audiences as individuals, not just emails in a database; learning which could be used to inform future marketing and fundraising campaigns.
Further segments were created to re-engage subscribers in the database who hadn’t engaged with the charity for a little while. It’s much more cost effective to get this audience interested again, than to try to find the same amount of new subscribers elsewhere. If these people were invested enough to join the mailing list in the past, I knew we could win them back with a bit of creative thinking. The solution was to plan, write and set-up two email campaigns tailored specifically for this audience group. Once launched, these campaigns had considerably higher engagement rates and the majority of the subscribers reactivated ahead of the annual appeal.
From the data-cleaning exercise to re-engaging past subscribers, each part of the project came together to create the best performing winter appeal for the charity. Not only that but the team now have the knowledge and skills to continue making email a strategic part of their communication strategy.
