Juste pour rire is a pillar of the comedy world and its international reputation needs no introduction. The festival stands as a fixture of the Montreal cultural scene with its colourful programme. Every major event brings its share of planning, and what could be better than proactivity and email marketing from its digital agency to make requests faster to handle and so save an enormous amount of time?
Newsletters, a ton of newsletters!
To reach as many consumers as possible, quickly and anywhere, a good number of companies use newsletters to communicate their news and promotions. With the arrival of responsive design, the experience is now adapted to newsletters on every platform and that technology is becoming the industry standard. That is no surprise when you know that:
- 79% of consumers who own a smartphone read their email on it
- 71.2% of customers delete newsletters that are not readable on their smartphone
- 30% of customers unsubscribe from newsletters that are not readable on their smartphone
This is the communication method Juste pour rire uses, wanting to drive ticket sales and add to the visibility of its shows by sending out several newsletters a day.
Because Groupe Juste pour rire brings together different entities (Juste pour rire, Just for Laugh, JFL42, La Rue, Mondial des Jeux), each with its own brand to respect, being able to customize the newsletters is far from a minor point.
The starting objectives:
In order to comply with the new legal provisions governing email solicitation and to help JPR find its way through the new complexity those provisions can create, and also with the aim of being well prepared for the festival season, MultipleMedia put a smart and complete game plan in place:
- An effective CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
- Full integration of various sources (ticketing, website)
- Automated list management
- Consolidated management of subscriptions and consents
- Responsive newsletter templates
- A toolbox that can grow
Variety, complexity and reach of the communications
Those words describe well the email marketing carried out daily during the Festival, whose content can be informational as much as promotional. A distinction between lists is then needed (with or without solicitation) in order to comply with Bill C-28. Some of these sends are generic while other "smart" sends go to specific lists, which makes extracting and validating the data beforehand necessary, and above all makes it possible to strengthen relationship marketing. MultipleMedia also contributed to managing the Juste pour rire product offering through the regular "Passeport" type sends, where users were led to reserve daily the show they wanted to attend with their season pass.
CRM: an automated and well thought out list management solution
In order to automate consent management for Juste pour rire customers who are not subscribed to the communications, MultipleMedia built and implemented a CRM along with several modules. This new business solution centralizes all purchase information in one place in order to limit list handling and keep better track of each customer’s history. The tool also has a specific customer search function.
On the technical side, the automation consists of:
- Building the application modules so they communicate directly with the APIs of the sales intermediaries
- Building a module to extract the relevant website data related to newsletter sign-ups on hahaha.com
- Implementing the business rules needed to update the active lists and automatically handle the consent process
As mentioned above, Groupe Juste pour rire is made up of distinct entities that each address their own audience. There is notably a difference in lists between Juste pour Rire and its English-language counterpart, Just for laughs.
With the aim of creating several distinct lists, the main preliminary steps are:
- Data extraction
- Standardizing the information and importing it into the CRM database
- Processing the consent management lists
- Integration with MM-Postal, our email management platform
- Running the consent campaigns
Several periodic and regular updates keep the information coming from the various sources in sync and move it through the list management modules, then refresh it in our newsletter sending system. More advanced queries in the CRM also make it possible to create specific lists at the client’s request.
Customizable proactivity: responsive newsletter templates
The creation of responsive newsletter templates, proposed by MultipleMedia, answers several needs, which can be grouped this way:
Business
- More impulse purchases
- Customer loyalty
- Regular publication about the shows presented and the promotions
- A stronger brand for Groupe Juste pour rire and its entities
The interests of the JPR sales and marketing team were put forward in creating the newsletter templates. A strong brand is maintained across all the daily informational and promotional sends, building loyalty among both the French-speaking and the English-speaking audience of this internationally known festival. Each piece of content is laid out so the important information is quickly reachable, which encourages impulse purchases.
Technical
- Easy customization and adaptation of the content for the group’s different entities
- Display adapted to every type of screen for consumers who are more and more mobile
- More speed and effectiveness for the MultipleMedia team
Built responsively, the templates make the newsletters reachable on every platform, adapting to different screen sizes for the best possible visual experience. A better penetration rate in the mobile market reflects this change, which lines up perfectly with the partial redesign of the responsive site.
Being customizable, the product is easy to adapt to the various entities of Groupe Juste pour rire. The events field changes very quickly and calls for being very responsive. These templates let us be exactly that, even when we receive an urgent request a few hours ahead of time, cutting the integration time almost in half! It is an innovative project that shows our determination to keep adapting to our clients’ needs and particularities.
The results speak for themselves!
- Very good open rate, between 25 and 30%
- Click rate above 10%, most of which led to a purchase
- Negligible unsubscribe rate below 3%
- A 300% increase in subscribers
- A 250% increase in the volume of French and English emails sent
- Many targeted sends resulting from several list extractions
"The hahaha.com website, for its part, passed the 1,450,000 visit mark in July alone, more than half of that from mobile devices and tablets, for a total of 3.7 million page views," says Jean-David Pelletier of Juste pour rire, good proof of the strength of our partnership.
There is nothing like statistics to express the success of this project, but beyond the numbers, the Festival proved once again how well the fine MultipleMedia team works together. Everyone pitched in, and that is how we made this large project come off!