Disney magic is meant to be shared. After the pandemic, engagement with Disney's email programme had fallen, along with the revenue it generated. By reimagining how we connected with guests, we reignited engagement, boosted revenue, and brought a little more Disney magic to every inbox.
In the 2022 financial year that the new programme launched, we delivered a 120% increase on the previous year’s total, from a guest database only 11% larger.
A 15% boost in active customers — guests who purchased or engaged by clicking or downloading — measured against a representative control group.
A 38% jump in unique clicks and a 13% increase in the overall click rate, driven by hyper-interactive email experiences.
A 26% boost in conversion to the shopdisney.co.uk e-commerce channel, alongside a 6% uplift in average annual revenue generated per user.
From faltering engagement to a year of wonder
We know that two metrics directly influence a Disney guest’s long term value: the number of different categories they engage with, and the depth of that engagement.
Disney’s EMEA email programme was an engine of this engagement, but in 2022 response had started to falter, as disrupted customer behaviours settled into new patterns.
Our strategy needed to influence both of these levers — while allowing us to collect valuable, actionable customer insights — conveying the joy of Disney within this typically performance-focused channel.
We set out to elevate the inbox experience beyond imagination, delivering the innovation, magic and wonder that Disney is famous for. We’d stretch the art of the possible to make emails more interactive and more clickable than ever before — an unparalleled, year-long customer experience.
This focus on hyper-interactivity had two core strategic purposes:
- Wow customers with something they’d never seen before, inspiring action through a true sense of wonder
- Drive maximum engagement within the email itself. Following Apple’s Privacy Policy changes, click-based interactivity would allow us to identify active customers, deepen our first-party data, and progressively optimise the effectiveness of the programme and future communications
The programme was ambitious to say the least — a year-long strategy, planned around 18 tentpole moments in the calendar and deployed across 13 EMEA countries. Behavioural segmentation, created from multiple data points, ensured that we maximised every cross-sell opportunity across Disney’s portfolio — from movies and merchandise to theme parks and West End shows — and properties, such as Marvel and Star Wars.
Making HTML do the impossible
Crafting truly enchanting email experiences can be challenging. However, our approach was centred on bringing the Disney magic into our messages.
Typically, interactive experiences need tools like JavaScript — but those don’t work in this channel.
We had to find a way to make HTML and CSS work in ways they weren’t designed to. We iterated until we had a code base capable of delivering interactive and responsive content reliably, in every possible email client. And we created fall-back web pages that seamlessly mirrored those interactive experiences for guests on email browsers that couldn’t support them.
This technological backbone then enabled us to create a programme of phenomenally innovative, unique campaigns across the year:
- Imagine being able to complete a word search or a crossword actually inside an email. Our enchanting Encanto and Disney Knowledge emails did just this, with tap to play interactivity and a pop-up keyboard
- For the Andor release, the entire email was concealed behind an imposing ship, which flew out of the way only when tapped, revealing the drama and spectacle of the Star Wars Universe
- For Marvel’s She Hulk, guests had to ‘crack’ the screen before they could access the content
- Halloween offered the perfect opportunity to create a tarot card-inspired interactive game. Tap a card and see it flip before your eyes, revealing the spooky characters
Our tech innovation delivered pure magic in each email, with relevant cross-sell and commercial calls to action providing more ways to engage.
When magic meets measurement, results follow
This was a strategic effort over time to rebuild customer engagement and data. We designed a robust measurement framework to help demonstrate the truth of our reasoning that interactivity would translate to customer value, and show whether the programme had delivered.
We ring-fenced a representative control group of customers in our largest market — the UK — which was sent the standard programme of emails. We then analysed varied engagement KPIs compared to the main audience receiving our hyper-interactive emails.
In the first 12 months of the programme (July ’22 – July ’23), our UK audience showed the following against the control: 15% growth in active customers, a 38% increase in unique clicks and 13% increase in the overall click rate, a 26% increase in conversion to the shopdisney.co.uk e-commerce channel, and a 6% uplift in the average annual revenue generated per user.
We used our “Global Fallow Cell” — a representative control sample of guests from the largest five EMEA markets (UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain), held out from all email comms — to calculate proven incremental revenue from the programme.
In the 2022 financial year that the new programme launched, we delivered a 120% increase on the previous year’s total, from a guest database only 11% larger.
Magic really does deliver results.
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