Today, though many businesses have turned to social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, for their marketing strategies, email remains the most profitable channel of them all. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email has the highest growth rate for any channel in 2015, and returns on investment are high. It is no surprise, then, that savvy marketers are looking to update their email campaigns to promote click-through rates and customer engagement. One such marketer is Nancy Weaver, senior manager of eBusiness for AAA Ohio, who’s leveraged the RealTime Email suite of marketing tools by Liveclicker to reap significant returns on two separate AAA campaigns.

While AAA Ohio pursued a new email solution partly due to its small marketing team (only two dedicated employees for the entire customer base) and declining email click-through rates, Weaver is emphatic that her decision to adopt Liveclicker was a proactive one. “We’re always trying to get the biggest bang for our buck out of all our campaigns,” she says. “The goal with Liveclicker was always to get as much engagement out of email as we could.” 

Thanks to Liveclicker, AAA Ohio club members can view live videos and images, forecasts, maps, polls, countdown timers to promote a sale or event, and up-to-the-minute social media feeds—all of which play within the email. 

Things are going well. Click-through rates for AAA Ohio’s first campaign with Liveclicker were 8 to 10 percent over expectations, and in its second campaign, click-through rates had gone up even further, to a whopping 31 percent over expectations. Weaver maintains that the new context-sensitive tools from Liveclicker have improved click-to-open rates as well, and her team’s approach to email has been reinvigorated: “It’s gotten them jazzed about email again. It helps them create more engaging content.”

That engagement is key. Sean McGarry, account development manager for Liveclicker, notes the new environment in which users are opening emails. “I hate to say Liveclicker enables gamification, but the truth about email is that over 50 percent of users now check their email on the same device they play games on. So email has to be a little bit more interactive,” he says.

Since RealTime Email’s initial deployment, Weaver has given presentations to other AAA clubs on her chapter’s success with Liveclicker, and there has been significant interest. “I think two or three other clubs have either adopted or are going to adopt Liveclicker. Ohio is a small club, about 3 percent of AAA users. But some of the interested clubs are big. That should increase the number of users seeing Liveclicker in their emails to something more around 30 percent,” she says. —Tye Pemberton