TRP Email Content Campaign

Streamlining email marketing with a focused experience.

TRP Email

Introduction

TRP is a division of PACCAR Parts that sells aftermarket parts for practically all makes of medium- and heavy-duty commercial vehicles. They send email marketing every month to both customers and leads, but were seeing little engagement with said emails. My team and I were brought in to improve on their email marketing to drive up engagement and sales with their loyalty program, TRP Performance.

Research and Discovery

TRP’s current email strategy was to send one email per month to two groups of customers:

  • Full members of their loyalty program
  • Potential leads, who have given some information, but not enough to be full members.

Their emails generally began with a sales-driven headline, some content relating to a particular product focus, and then exclusive offers with discounts for full members. We were seeing a decent number of opened emails, but little engagement.

With years of collected behavioral data from email work on PACCAR’s other divisions, Kenworth and Peterbilt, we already knew that their customers engaged more with the emails when there was something more than just offers, but we also saw that the larger issue was partially the type of content given, but even more the journey the customer was taking from email to purchase.

Key findings:

  • Customers engaged less with longform articles about products as opposed to short, easily-digestible content.
  • Videos on YouTube have gained a fan following, but linking to them in emails drove customers away from engaging with the client.
  • More often than not, there was no offer directly tied to the content, or a disconnect between the offer and the content.
TRP’s Email Template

TRP’s Email Template

User Flows for TRP

User Flows are the Answer

To illustrate our findings, two user flows were created. One showing the current flow, and a second with an idea on how we can improve. The current flow showed how easily the customer is lost to either being sent to an offer page with little context, or to outside content on the hope said customer will come and engage with the brand.

An improved plan would more involve using best practices we’ve implemented for many email campaigns with a very focused message and flow. The entire email would focus on one product with a call to action sending the customer to a special landing page that again focuses on the product in focus. Content within the email will play the role of a teaser with more information waiting at the website.

Final design of emails and landing pages

Final Design

For the final email design, we took out many items normally put into the TRP emails to condense the message into a single sales focus. Extraneous “greeting” copy was removed, and the only offer shown was the one being focused on. Rather than the content sitting in its own area separate from the offer, everything was brought into one compelling, but easily-digestible visual with a firm CTA inviting the user to learn more.

Upon request, the client also asked us to add a secondary CTA driving full members to see all their available offers and leads to complete their profile. We did attempt to dissuade this and keep a singular-focus, but the client stood firm. So I opted to visually separate that secondary CTA from the main content.

The landing page would carry a similar visual focus to the email, thus maintaining a fluid experience on the customer where not only they receive the full information on the product, but also the hook of savings with their loyalty membership.

Results and Takeaways

The email was a success with a 10% increase in user engagement and increased sales of the focused product. The client is now rethinking its email marketing to be more focused and content-driven, despite the lack of time or budget to generate content.

There are future plans to test the emails in driving recipients directly to the dealer as opposed to just the website. Ideas include more prominently displaying a member’s preferred retailer on the landing page and updating the messaging to sound as if it’s coming from their preferred retailer, as opposed to the brand. Part of this test would be to remove the CTA and replace it with more prominent dealer information.