Delivering an 82% boost in open rate and 371% boost in click rate in our historical Loxwood Joust email marketing campaign.
About Loxwood Joust
Loxwood Joust is the UK’s most spectacular Medieval festival. Set in Loxwood Meadow in Sussex, the event draws in thousands of passionate historians, fun-seeking families and costume-clad revellers from across the globe. Live jousting, full-contact battles, a living history village and medieval melodies are just a few of the core attractions.
The opportunity
When their much-loved copywriter moved on to pastures new, Loxwood searched for a replacement who could match her talent for the medieval tongue. At the same time, they sought to create a more unified approach to delivering their nurture campaign and to further drive interest within the growing immersive event market.
The solution
This project was split into two parts that needed to work seamlessly together: A website relaunch would kick off the ticket sales for 2022 and an email marketing campaign would inform and nurture the interest of attendees.
Website
Big Bee Content supported the launch of the website with copywriting, user journey development and blogs, focusing on creating a more immersive storytelling experience to bring the event to life, while optimising content to draw in organic traffic.
Working with the developers, MMXD and IDS Logic, we made SEO improvements to content and metadata, and worked to improve the flow of information across the website while connecting email marketing to the eCommerce integration.
Email marketing
Big Bee lent our expertise in email marketing to create a joined-up approach with Loxwood’s social media marketers, ByJove Media and the event’s artistic director, Paul Flannery. Pulling from Paul’s storyline, Big Bee built a series of narrative-based timed and automated email campaigns for ticketholders and non-ticketholders.
We focused on building intrigue through use of medieval voice and enticing subject lines, delivering the campaign in unison with social media messaging for added impact.
Outstanding results
Big Bee Content saw spectacular results in our first year working with Loxwood Joust.
On the website we saw an increase of 13% in users, 41% in direct traffic and 59% in unique pageviews year-on-year.
On emails, focusing on quality over quantity paid dividends, seeing an 82% rise in open rate, 371% increase in click-through rate and a 45% reduction in unsubscribes.
As a result Big Bee has been retained to continue our great work going forward.
Niki from Big Bee is a great addition to the Loxwood team helping to deliver a tone of voice and emails that really helped capture the imagination of our customers, resulting in more click throughs to the website. This tone of voice was also used in the creation of the programme. All of Niki's help and contribution to the new website was a big part of helping to bring a lot more interest to the festival and ultimately resulting in ticket sales.
Is your email marketing hitting the right mark? Get in touch and see how we can work together for marketing success.
Main image credit: Chrissie Brookes Photography
About the Author
Niki May Blane is founder of Big Bee Content – our ‘Queen Bee’.
She can most commonly be found buzzing around her computer, delivering virtual workshops, creating copious amounts of copy and drinking coffee to combat the ill effects of non-sleeping children.
