Revolution Bars & Airship

Revolution Bars Group has dramatically improved its email marketing using an improved Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system from digital marketing specialist Airship.The CRM solution builds on the strong relationship between Revolution and Airship, established over six years of working together, and recognises the need to continually improve customer marketing both as technology changes and as competition for customer spend heightens.

Benefits of the enhanced system include:

• Improved local ownership of customer marketing, with managers at each of Revolution Group’s 57 bars able to manage activity at site level through an interactive dashboard;
• An increase in the number of customers registered for email notifications, up by 336% in 4 years.
• Increased food sales through carefully targeted offers.
• Led to a 98% increase in party bookings in 4 years.

Crucially, Revolution’s emails are reaching more customers thanks to a focus by Airship on improving the brand’s ‘sender score’ with Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

Dan Brookman, Commercial Director of Airship, explained: “Revolution sends over four million emails a month, and over time the amount of traffic being identified as spam by ISPs had increased. We’ve significantly reduced this by cleaning the data, sending fewer emails at a time, and improving the design and wording of emails.“Revolution’s customers have signed up to receive emails, and so it’s important they don’t fall at the first hurdle by being incorrectly rejected by ISPs. We have continually ‘tweaked’ the process over the years, but this latest project has effectively rebuilt the system from the ground up over two years, and generated major improvements.”As a result of the project, the number of Revolution emails rejected by ISPs has fallen to just 0.25%, well below the industry average. In addition, the average click rate - the number of emails opened by customers - has risen by 1.47%.

Sam Jones, Head of Marketing at Revolution Bars Group, said: “We operate in a competitive market where maintaining customer loyalty and engagement is key. We are working particularly hard to grow food sales alongside our established reputation as a premium drinks business, and email communication with our customers is key to this.“Our long-standing partnership with Airship continues to deliver results, significantly reducing the number of undelivered emails at a time when our customer database is growing strongly.”The bespoke system developed by Airship integrates with Revolution’s web provider and other existing suppliers, including till and booking systems.

Airship’s work on the updated Revolution CRM was recognised with a Gold Award at the prestigious Institute of Promotional Marketing (IPM) COGS Awards.