Post Office needed to drive big improvements in the trading performance of their deteriorating 'Mails Market' (letters and small parcels). The overall business objectives were to:
- Increase footfall into branches
- Increase parcel sales
In research, it was revealed that customers had low awareness of Post Office's Sunday opening hours. We were tasked with creating widespread awareness and cut-through of Sunday opening hours.
The strategy was to dominate Twitter for one day only with #LoveSundays, celebrating everything great about Sundays, from brunch to pyjamas to Sunday roast and of course, Post Office's new opening hours. Twitter was perfectly placed to generate broad awareness and also relevance and engagement with the core message, by tapping into key moments in a user's Sunday.
The campaign was activated in a 'war room', in order to produce Twitter content reactively and to optimise promoted tweet activity. The planned Twitter content was designed to align perfectly with people's Sunday activities and we ran mini competitions throughout the day encouraging user generated content, in exchange for Onesies, Costa Coffee vouchers and more. We produced social content reactively when topics relevant to our customers were trending in order to increase the reach of our message, as well offering real-time, personalised customer service helping to signpost customers to their nearest branch open on a Sunday.
The campaign exceeded all objectives, #LoveSundays trended organically and we shifted core business metrics leading to an instant short-term gain in trading.
This campaign deserves to win because it was an exceptional example of using Twitter in a real-time way to drive awareness of and engagement with a core message.
The visual and video content we produced in advance and real-time on the day was vibrant, creative and fully aligned with the above-the-line creative. It tapped into what people were doing throughout the day on Sunday to make it hyper-relevant.
Similarly, we produced visual content reactively around what was trending on the day. For example, we created content around The Open (Golf), Rise of the Planet of the Apes ("Now open before you're fully human") and Prince George's First Steps ("It's next steps for us. We're now open on Sundays"). Our nimble approach also meant we were able to swiftly respond to opportunities such a funny tweet from Church of England ("Really pleased you #LoveSundays too. We've been openSundays for a few centuries. Welcome to the party.")
We made use of the stop-motion capabilities of Vine, showcasing Sunday activities in a creative and visually engaging way. We were one of the first brands to use Vine as an 'activity roulette', helping people decide what to do with their day simply by clicking or touching to stop the wheel.
The promoted tweet campaign was constantly optimised throughout the day and the creative was regularly refreshed to ensure that we retained high levels of engagement at a low cost per engagement.
The personalised content and customer service that we offered throughout the day not only helped signpost customers to their nearest branch open on Sunday, but helped increase positive perceptions of the Post Office. For example, we created images with personalised branch finder maps for individual Twitter users based on the location they gave us.
The mini-competitions we ran were popular and helped us drive user generated content and wider uptake of the #LoveSundays hashtag. The entry mechanics were simple (e.g. "tell us how you take your Sunday coffee") and this low barrier to entry encouraged the strong uptake.
All of the above activity meant that we were trending in the UK organically by midday, helping us to reach our objective of widespread awareness and at a lower cost than buying a Promoted Trend.
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.
- Post Office 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.
This campaign was a real landmark campaign for the Post Office that has changed the way they think about social media, and gave them learnings that were then applied to on-going campaigns during 2014.
