Calendar Club
Email campaigns
Skills employed: Email campaign planning · Personalisation strategy · Promotional copywriting
Key wins
10M+ emails a season
Campaign copy and planning behind a programme sending over 10 million emails in each of the last two peak seasons.
Personalisation at scale
Recommendations built from purchase history and bestseller data, working across a 5,000–6,500 SKU range.
Discipline over discounting
Two tightly time-boxed campaigns, Early Bird and the store closure reminder, kept discounting minimal everywhere else in the season.
Each year at Calendar Club I planned and oversaw the main marketing campaign behind two launches: the opening of short-term stores across the UK and Ireland (between 270 and 300 of them) for the September to January season, and the online launch of the new year calendar and diary range. In-store, the message stayed consistent season to season – Calendar Club are Back in Town – while online the focus shifted to the new year range itself.
The audience was predominantly women buying either family planners to keep the home organised, or calendar and diary gifts for the rest of the family, and a large proportion were repeat buyers returning for the same products or themes year after year. The August email campaign – Early Bird – was built specifically for the most organised of these: parents who wanted particular calendars and didn't want to risk missing out. Working closely with the Senior UX/UI designer, we gave Early Bird a retro, 'Disney-esque' feel, partly a creative response to licensing restrictions that ruled out many calendar themes and forced us to find other ways to make the range feel appealing.
Supporting copy had to stay concise and broadly appealing across a range of 5,000–6,500 SKUs, with personalisation doing a lot of the work: the top block of the template was dedicated to previously bought titles (updated to the new year version) and/or bestsellers, so the calendars people saw first were the ones most likely to be relevant to them. In the last two years of my time there, this program sent over 10 million emails across peak season.
Promotion
Early Bird
Objective: convert the most organised, highest-intent customers with a strictly time-boxed online discount, run and closed before stores opened, so footfall – not discounting – stayed the priority once the season began
Call to action: shop now
Deliberately short copy for a campaign that didn't need to work hard to justify itself – the discount and the retro 'Disney-esque' art direction did most of the persuading, with the text kept to the essentials: the offer, the code, and a light, knowing nod to 2020.
Subject: Early bird offer: 20% off everything!
We think it's fair to say that 2020 has been quite a strange year and even though it's far from over, we are already starting to look forward to 2021. Get ready for the new year with your exclusive early bird discount and enjoy 20% off everything on our website. Just enter the code below when you check out.
Discount code: EB2020
Early Bird ran for around four weeks and closed as soon as the first store opened – part of a deliberate strategy to keep discounting to a minimum between September and Christmas Day, when the aim was to push footfall into stores rather than compete with them online.
Geotargeted reminder
Store Closing Soon
Objective: give store customers a clear, time-limited reason to visit before their local store closed for the season, without pulling online shoppers away from the website
Call to action: find your local store
Sent geotargeted by postcode at the end of each store season, this was the discount period referenced above – up to 40% off, timed to clear stock ahead of close-down. The copy names the customer's actual local store to keep the message concrete, is explicit that click and collect was available, and closes by reassuring people that online shopping continued beyond the store closures.
Subject: Your local Calendar Club store is closing soon
It's time to say goodbye! Visit Calendar Club in High Street, Exeter before the store closes.
As the festive season comes to a close, it's sadly almost time for Calendar Club to pack up and leave town again until Autumn 2022.
Has Santa let you down? Did you miss out on the calendar you really wanted? Head to your local store in High Street, Exeter and get 40% off everything including calendars, planners, diaries and more. But hurry, the store is closing in the next few days.
We can't wait to see you next time we're Back in Town!
Don't forget, if you can't get into the store soon, you can always shop online with thousands of titles at up to 40% off.
Of the two, Early Bird was consistently the highest revenue generator and the most popular with customers – particularly the organised, repeat-buying parents it was built for, though it reliably picked up its share of January panic buyers too. The store closure reminder had a narrower job: it was never going to convert online shoppers into store visitors, but for people already inclined to shop in person, a clear, personal reminder of a limited window reliably boosted revenue in stores during their final days open.
Read my Calendar Club case study: Building a new retail brand from scratch.
