Stellantis Performance Academy.

90% Open Rates? How we mastered internal comms for a Global Automotive Manufacturer.

The Stellantis Performance Academy is the sole provider of learning and development for all nine UK Stellantis brands offering sector leading sales and service training for their franchised retailers. Back in Q1 2023 We Are Acuity were asked to support the world’s fourth-largest automaker to support its UK training academy in driving engagement, improving communication and building community with its network of over 700 local franchise partners across more than 450 sites. Of course we jumped at the opportunity to get involved.

Listen instead?

“Everything I’ve thrown at you, the problems and the nuances you haven’t shied away from. You’ve allowed the team and I to share our thoughts and listened very attentively to what we say...
Very excited to see what the next phase of this all looks like.”

Andy Martin
Digital Content & Learning Technologies Manager

Challenge

Communicating with such a vast network can be tricky. There’s different brands represented in different locations, with retailer roles varying from management to sales to service. Plus apprentices. Then there’s the communication channel, how to best get the message out there? Next it’s when to communicate and how often. And what about the content itself. Who’s creating it? Who’s approving it? Who’s sending it and from where?

Without a strategic plan in place it’s easy to get in a position of not really knowing what is and isn’t working, and sending out a tick box communication just to hit a certain deadline or KPI. Once in this position, internal teams who are responsible for managing and deploying the communication can quickly lose confidence in what they’re doing.

Insight

With such a large network to connect with email communications are vitally important to the Performance Academy, so we set about looking at their current processes for sending emails. This included the systems used, the creation of the content and copy, the internal approvals processes and the results they were seeing.

After spending time with the team and getting to know their roles it was clear that there were several things we could help them with which in turn would improve engagement with the retailer network.

A more efficient approach: broadcasting emails via word document mail merges which were pulled into Outlook meant the team didn’t have the agility they needed. It would simply take too long to get an email campaign sent out.
Consistency: with the internal team creating emails themselves, branding and tone of voice would often be inconsistent. The same email, sent at different times by different team members would look and read very differently.
Tone of voice: the tone and language used wasn’t conducive to building relationships and working in partnership with the retailer network. We could improve this and bring to life how the Performance Academy adds value.
One size doesn’t fit all: with such a diverse audience we set about splitting email communications by persona and role to maximise the relevance of the emails being received.

Solution

Our immediate recommendations to improve email engagement and quality fell in to 3 areas.

Branded Templates: we wanted to build the Performance Academy brand, making it visible in all communications including emails. We developed a range of retailer facing email templates covering a number of topics, which were ready for the internal team to use. No need for the team to create their own emails anymore.
Tone of Voice: the Performance Academy offers class leading training and helps delegates and retailers to perform at their maximum. This needed to be reflected in the tone of the copy used, making it warm, human, inspirational and exciting. Pre-approved copy removed the need for the team to write their own copy.
New Poppulo email system: we introduced a new internal comms email platform, taking away the need for labour intensive mail merges and Outlook email sends. This would instantly improve visibility of results and allow the team to be far more agile in their approach.

Results

We’ll be tracking a wide range of email based KPIs throughout 2024. First quarter results have been hugely encouraging.

Outside of the hard metrics, the Performance Academy team are fully trained on the new Poppulo email platform and have confidence in the results they are seeing. This new way of sending emails is saving significant time and allowing the team to support more retailers.

1,000+ email sends to date from the new system.

90% open rate on specific campaigns, 40% average.

28% average click-to-open rate, significantly above benchmark for internal comms.

12%+ average click rate, also significantly above benchmark.

Clear data insights on the best days and times to communicate via email.

If you’d like to talk about your brand’s local marketing why not schedule a FREE discovery call here? It could be the best decision you ever make.

Or alternatively read more about Local Marketing on our blog page “Local Thinking’: https://www.weareacuity.com/local-thinking-our-blog

Let's talk.

FREE DISCOVERY CALL

Click below to arrange a chat with Peter to
see how we can maximise your marketing.