The Dream Machine
BOTB (Best of the Best plc) offers customers the opportunity to win their dream car, running competitions since 1999 and giving away over £34 million in prizes through guaranteed weekly winners in Dream Car, Midweek, and Lifestyle competitions. They were interested to see if partnering with Paperplanes would allow them to engage with clients in new ways and deliver relevant education at the correct time, as they had used direct mail previously but never to any measurable success. Understanding that customers were more likely to remain engaged if they returned to play within 60 days, BOTB needed to identify the optimal timing for direct mail interventions.
Taking the Wheel
Paperplanes and BOTB collaborated to understand the right strategy for programmatic direct mail to drive engagement and sales, testing whether sending content between 0-30 days or 31-60 days would be more effective. Working with a subset of 6,000 customers who had signed up to BOTB, Paperplanes triggered month 1 and month 2 follow-ups to determine whether personalised, educational letters with incentives would perform better after 30 days or 60 days. The testing plan was carefully designed to measure both immediate conversion and longer-term revenue impact, allowing for data-driven optimisation of future campaigns.
Podium Finish
The campaign delivered impressive results across both timing strategies, with 31% of customers receiving the month 1 campaign returning to play and 26% of month 2 recipients coming back to engage. Return rates were 50% higher for mailed customers versus non-mailed customers in the 60-day group, demonstrating clear incremental impact from the direct mail intervention. Whilst both campaigns performed well on conversion, the 60-day group also generated incremental revenue on top of incremental engagement, leading to strong ROI and establishing optimal timing frameworks for future customer re-engagement campaigns.
