No wasted opportunity at Collard Group
The importance of the new year in the waste industry
For waste management businesses the new year is one of the busiest times of the year, alongside other seasonal events such as bank holidays, with many homeowners looking to start a home upgrade or DIY, or simply de-clutter their property in preparation for the new year.
So, when our client Collard Group jumped at the chance to seize the new year in January, we got to work straight away with a plan to promote its skips and skip bags, roll-on roll-off (RoRo) skip hires, man and van services, and grab hires.
The plan of action
To kick off the process, we pitched a variety of campaign tag lines to grab the attention of the audience of homeowners and DIYers that we already had a great understanding of through our ongoing work with Collard. Through collaborating with Collard’s senior management team, we settled on ‘Inflation Busting Rates’ to push the message that Collard could offer competitive prices for their services during a time when the cost of living was having an effect. This was also underpinned by a 15% off discount on its services to further support this message.
We implemented a plan to create a series of social media posts with accompanying graphics, a feature in its regular monthly newsletter managed by our social team, and a separate e-shot dedicated to pushing the campaign and its messaging. All channels and assets featured the 15% off discount, which was displayed each time in an attractive roundel to gain attention.
To ensure the social media posts did not become repetitive and too spam-like, we set a topic for each caption, covering an introduction to the campaign and the discount, a focus specifically on skip bags and the man and van services, and a ‘last chance’ message on the day before the discount ended. Furthermore, the accompanying graphics used different layouts and pictures of the services for each post. In order to push the campaign further, we sponsored one of these posts on Facebook for the duration of the campaign, targeting a custom audience of homeowners and DIYers to drive website visits and sales.
The dedicated e-shot ran at the start of the campaign, chosen at a date and time which has been tried and tested at Harris to increase open rates. Using the same branding as the graphics to keep consistency for awareness and recognition, the e-shot gave an overview of the waste management solutions on offer to help recipients decide which service was right for them, with all images and suitable words linked to the website.
We also pushed the campaign as the main story in the regular monthly newsletter, again giving a round-up of the services, promoting the discount and driving readers to the website.
The results
In just over three weeks, the campaign resulted in a record number of visits to the website.
The dedicated e-shot received 9,915 total opens, with over 6K unique opens across its lists, suggesting that a high number of recipients kept coming back to read the email or subsequently click through to the website to order.
The social media posts performed well, gaining a good total of reach/impressions, reactions and clicks across the platforms. And the sponsored post performed very well, returning a great number of clicks and a high reach.
The result was a highly successful campaign in terms of website visits and sales. Web sales in January 2023 showed significant increases on the two previous January’s, including 2021 which was still in the lockdown DIY-boom.
“The team at Harris were straight on it when we decided in January that we needed a push to get phones ringing and web sales boosted. They were responsive and creative with a range of suggestions that proved to be effective.” – Adam Murnieks, development director at Collard Group.