Case Study: RED Driving School

Email drives instructor acquisition for UK’s No 1 driving school.

The award winning RED Driving School is one of the largest in the UK with more than 1300 instructors covering over 120 postcodes. Teaching thousands of people to drive every month RED also have the title of the UK’s “Favourite National Franchise”. RED use email for a number of activities from internal communications to acquisition of new training instructors.

RED Driving School

Challenges

The main focus of RED’s email marketing is the acquisition of new driving instructors, nurturing potential leads for up to 6 years whilst they consider changing their career. Through structured correspondence programmes RED engage their database of more than 100k prospects to educate them about the brand, opportunities and training offers. e-shot™ enables them to send personalised, targeted, efficient communications at scale, cost effectively, something that traditional telesales and DM couldn’t achieve. With e-shot™ the small marketing team have been able to have a very big impact.

 

e-shot™ is critical to the success of our instructor acquisition programme. We are able to follow-up with new prospects quickly and efficiently. The clear, concise reporting helps us optimise our campaigns and the integration of both email and SMS reports gives us a comprehensive view of our prospects engagement throughout our campaigns.

Andy Mitchell, Commercial Director

How e-shot™ helped

RED’s challenge was how to engage quickly, efficiently and affordably with a substantial database of prospects who have signed up through their website enquiry form. e-shot™ is an easy to use, flexible platform that enables them to develop both strategic and tactical campaigns. RED have found the ease of the A/B testing function an important element to optimise the effectiveness of their campaigns. The addition of SMS to RED’s strategy has further improved their results, and through multichannel campaigns are able to increase their reach. Using SMS to target email non-display as well as providing an additional opportunity to reinforce key promotions RED are reaping the benefit and using the integrated reporting to maximise their communication potential.

Results, ROI and the future

RED’s strategic programme runs over a 3 month period drawing prospects through the sales funnel. The series of emails promoting benefits of working within the industry/market, case studies of instructors along with enrolment offers and specific benefits of working with RED, supported by SMS reminders, educate and engage prospects. The aim is to initially identify 500 prospects as hot leads with a view to convert 125 to course sign-ups. By segmenting prospects and focusing on their warmth and engagement these programmes can generate around £200k incremental revenue. 

Because e-shot™ is so easy to use, team can quickly take advantage of specific opportunities, creating effective campaigns in very short timeframe. For example, when a horse called “Definitely Red” was running in 2017 Grand National the team were able to create a tactical campaign in a matter of hours which generated 480 direct responses, who provided a 75% display rate on the follow-up campaign.

 

e-shot™ is the backbone of our marketing communications and has taken our acquisition programme to a new level. Email is our most important channel, which is now getting even better results with the addition of SMS. The integration of both media, and combined reporting is proving very, very effective.

Andy Mitchell, Commercial Director
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