In 2006, Aussie bargain hunters rejoiced when brothers Gabby and Hezi Leibovich launched the Catch of the Day website. As one of the first daily deal websites in the country, Catch of the Day brought steep discounts to price-conscious consumers and pioneered the “flash sale” model in Australia. Shoppers were hooked.
After spending their initial years building Catch of the Day into a leading daily deal site, the brothers launched a number of new websites. Under the parent company – Catch Group – the new websites offered deep discounts on products and services across a variety of categories. In 2010, they launched Scoopon which offers discounts on travel packages as well as deals on local entertainment, restaurants, and health and beauty services. The following year Catch Group launched Grocery Run – a marketplace for discounted grocery items. In 2012, they introduced Eat Now (which was sold for $855m in 2015) and Mumgo, which is geared towards new moms and offers baby items, toys and products.
In 2014, Catch of the Day launched a BETA trial of a paid membership program called Club Catch. The program gave members free and faster shipping, access to exclusive deals, special flash sales and sneak peek events as well as VIP customer service across all of Catch Group’s websites. During the BETA period, they found that Club Catch members spent 4 times the amount that non-members spent over the same period*. In 2015, the BETA for the Club Catch concluded and the loyalty program became available to the general public.
In June 2017, Catch of the Day rebranded as Catch and relaunched as an online marketplace, putting itself in direct competition with Amazon, which would enter the Australian market in December 2017. Instead of offering the same products sold by multiple sellers, Catch worked directly with brands and partnered exclusively with the ones that offered the best prices to their subscribers.
Today, Catch Group is one of the top online retailers in Australia. With over 450,000 daily site visitors and over 8,000 orders per day, the retailer sells an item every 2.8 seconds. Catch Group now runs online stores and deal sites under the brand names: Catch, Scoopon, Grocery Run, Mumgo, Bon Voyage, The Home, Brands Exclusive and the clothing brand Pumpkin Patch. The company offers products across a wide range of categories including fashion, accessories, sportswear, home decor, health & lifestyle products, groceries, and travel.
Powered by smart marketing and word of mouth from avid fans, Catch Group experienced a meteoric rise to become one of the most visited Australian websites, generating $350 million in sales per year. Since the early days of the company, email has been a crucial component of Catch Group’s marketing and communications strategy. In 2017, Maya Sousa, Head of CRM and Marketing Operations at Catch Group spearheaded the effort to update and improve the company’s email program with a goal of enhancing customer experience, increasing efficiency and applying email best practices across the company and its brands.
With a long-standing trust in Data Axle’s vision and expertise, Maya enlisted the team’s award-winning creative services to rebuild Catch Group’s master email template, improve the overall email design workflow and help improve deliverability and data hygiene.
“I had collaborated with Data Axle before, so when I joined Catch Group, I knew I could rely on their email strategy and design expertise to help us improve the customer experience. In addition, their deliverability and data hygiene services proved instrumental in helping us maintain a clean database and achieve optimal inboxing rates.”
Catch Group sends daily email alerts about a variety of deals to millions of subscribers across multiple websites. As a high-volume sender, the brand required flexibility, speed and consistency within the email channel for its seven brands. Unfortunately, their existing template system was stretched too thin and could no longer meet the brand’s needs. “The static modular design template we had been using could no longer support the brands’ mailing programs. We needed a modern, responsive template that would enable us to create visually striking email content across a variety of platforms, empower us to support the sophisticated designs we wanted to implement and allow us to cross-promote all of Catch Group’s brands,” said Maya.
Knowing the importance of mobile for their on-the-go consumers, Catch Group also set out to improve their mobile email experience. Their existing template was not responsive and could not support the needs of the brand’s increasingly mobile audience
To achieve their goals, Catch Group worked with Data Axle to create a responsive email template with mobile-first design that would optimize the use of space while encouraging readers to scroll all the way through the content.
In addition, building a large, well-organized footer allowed Catch Group to include additional details that enabled them to better cross-promote their brands. Finally, custom modules gave Catch Group the ability to quickly and easily create a unique look for each of their brands.
In partnership with Data Axle, Catch Group completed their new templates in early 2018 and decided to test them with deployments to their paying Club Catch members. Half of the test recipients received the old template and half received the new one. The results were decisive: the redesigned template generated a 47% increase in unique click rate and a 90% increase in click to open rate.
Catch Group then went on to test the new templates for their welcome emails, which are sent to new subscribers when they create a free account for the flagship Catch website. The test using the new template generated more than twice the unique click rate and a 50% increase in purchase rate. In addition, the new template vastly improved the mobile user experience with initial tests showing a 143% increase in mobile unique click rate. Finally, the new template allowed the group to substantially reduce email development time and made it easier for even the most novice team members to create beautiful email messages.
Welcome Email
New Template (zoomed in)
“We are thrilled with the increase in engagement and conversion we’ve seen since implementing the new template designed by Data Axle. Our customers love it and our team loves it because it delivers incremental results while making our jobs easier.”
Travis Rice, Creative Director at Data Axle explains, “Catch Group’s new template system is robust, modern, and optimized for retail. The product photography drives the layouts, while the large headlines and CTA buttons give the reader the crucial information they need while scanning. The system is bright, open, and most importantly, built for mobile engagement. Catch Group’s success is a testament to the benefits of a solid template system.”
Catch Group had a goal of improving their overall email best practices, which extended beyond design and included deliverability and data hygiene enhancements. They worked with Data Axle’s team to create a quick and easy way to benchmark their deliverability success. Catch Group started using Inboxable to track how ISPs (Internet Service Providers) rated their domain & IP reputation and monitor any subscriber complaints. Sophisticated segmentation practices across Catch Group brands and an emphasis on issue remediation allowed Catch Group to reduce spam folder placement and improve its IP reputation and inbox placement rates. In addition, practicing mail stream separation on secondary domains and IPs allowed the brand to effectively run reactivation campaigns without risking deliverability issues for its main program.
Not one to stand still, Catch Group continues to make bold moves in the Australian market. After redesigning their email template, they merged with Lux Group to expand their offerings and put the company in an even stronger position to face Amazon and remain the top online retailer in Australia. With the merger’s finalization, the marketing team needed to ensure their emails could accommodate the needs of Lux Group’s brands as well.
“Shortly after the template was completed, we merged with Lux Group and needed to incorporate their brand’s design elements into our emails. With the template system designed by Data Axle, creating a consistent look and feel for our new brands was a matter of updating simple elements within the template, such as the logo and color scheme. Without our new templates, it would have taken us weeks to communicate a cohesive message that adhered to each brand’s guidelines.”
In addition, Catch Group worked with Data Axle’s deliverability team to ensure that the post-merger migration of Lux’s email program went smoothly. Together, they developed a smart IP ramp-up strategy that would establish and steadily improve their sending reputation with ISPs and ensure that Lux brand emails sent from the new IP would make it to their audience’s inboxes.
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