Today, MediaPost’s Email Insider Marketing event in Austria heard from Gonçalo Salgado, Digital Marketing & Transformation at Galp, a gas company. (BP is a competitor.)

The brand had 400,000 email B2C subscribers that came from an offline loyalty program. No one had signed up for a newsletter. There were no active sales taking place online and Galp didn’t track purchases. Any information was decentralized and not in the email system.

Then, it made the shift to go digital, to build a relationship with its customers, who have shifted to online. Email was sent as part of an integrated marketing approach: apps, website, cross- and upselling gas and convenience products.

In 2017, Galp started doing email with simple testing, kind of a trial and error thing. It had no overall strategy. It was sending 3 million emails. The following year, it started doing A/B testing in copy and design. The click rate went up from 2.1% to 3.5% because of a bold title and better framing. “We were guiding the eye of the client to the benefits,” Salgado said. “Email is like talking to a child.”

Another insight was that the copy should be benefit oriented and not product oriented. Here, the click rate went up to 4.9% from 3.4%. Galp had a second person look at the email in order to have a broader overview and to evaluate legitimate metrics.

In order to build customer goodwill, the brand send a discount coupon on the customer’s birthday. It was very effective, leading to a 76% open rate and 15,000 app installs. The customer was told to install the app if it wanted more coupons.

Next, it took a “bit by bit” approach and split information across four emails, sending shorter emails with one message at a time.

And, finally, turning to content marketing, it sent a purely promotional email first and then mixed in content in order to perform better.

In 2018, it sent 2 million more emails than the year prior. The click rate doubled as did the open-to-click rate.