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Print communication is integral to People’s Postcode Lottery’s (PPL) player journey and customer retention. It’s helped lengthen average player lifetime and driven more people to play – two powerful engines for raising more and more money for charities year after year.
To date, its players have raised more than £1 billion for charitable organisations, supporting over 9,000 local, national, and international projects. Over 3.4 million players who won shared a total of nearly £189 million in prizes between them last year.
To build on this achievement, PPL decided to test in the UK an eye-catching gold foil polywrapped mail campaign that had already proven highly successful for it in the Netherlands.
But as a charitable organisation with a firm commitment to CSR – and a deep awareness of the values of the organisations it supports – it needed to do so in a sustainable way.
And the challenge of replicating the outstanding performance of the original campaign more sustainably was huge.
So PPL turned for help to its direct marketing partner, The Dragonfly Agency. And Dragonfly immediately spotted a problem: the process used for creating the gold polywrap for the Dutch campaign was outdated and had a huge carbon footprint.
“When we got the brief to replicate the Dutch test, we were at a bit of a loss at how to do this in a cost effective and sustainable way,” says PPL print marketing manager Grant Shaw.
“The team at Dragonfly were great at quickly exploring and providing options until we reached the ideal solution.”
Dragonfly’s first step was to identify what material could replace the polywrap.
It chose paper, and sourced it responsibly through the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). It then turned to fully carbon-balancing both the paper and the production process to ensure a totally sustainable solution, and did this through working with World Land Trust.
Next, it was time to go for gold.
After plenty of research, Dragonfly identified a shiny gold solution that ticked all the boxes – a double hit of solid metallic water-based sustainable ink would create the impact of the original pack.
But having a sustainably produced gold ink wasn’t enough. To get the absolute most out of the ink, any excess from the print run was recycled back into the production of other colours, minimising toxicity and waste,
With waste ink recycled in-house at the printer, and 100% of the envelope fully recyclable through normal household recycling, all involved were 100% confident in its sustainable credentials.
But sustainability was just one part of the brief. Also important was to achieve high impact.
Dragonfly assessed different pack design concepts using eye-tracking analysis and, by doing so, discovered that a secondary window above the address window was the first thing the recipient would view.
Using plastic for two windows was not a sustainable option, of course. So, to avoid losing the added performance a second window would generate, an alternative window film was identified which was both compliant with British Standards Institution's Publicly Available Specification 2020 (BSI PAS 2020) in terms of its recyclability.
To further enhance and elevate the DM pack’s look, Dragonfly sourced an LED spot UV that complied with the sustainable advertising mail restrictions that were in place at the time.
The end result was a sustainable, recyclable alternative to the gold polywrap original. All ink used was water-based. It was eco-friendly from production to final output. And it looked great.
The ultimate measure of success for the new eco-friendly gold DM pack lay in the responses, however. So, it was pitched head-to-head against PPL’s best-performing control pack to test this and benchmark performance.
The results tell their own story. The new pack not only reduced PPL’s carbon footprint but also delivered a 74.7% increase in response rate when tested against PPL’s previous best-performing control pack.
“The team at People’s Postcode Lottery are an absolute joy to work with. They care massively about the world we live in and social responsibility is at the forefront of everything they do,” says Gary Hunter, senior procurement manager at Dragonfly. “Collectively we are always striving to be as environmentally friendly as possible in this modern world and we are very proud of the results that we have generated from the gold envelope”.
Marketreach Insight
Sustainability in marketing – it’s not just the right thing to do for the planet, it is the right thing to do for the consumer. Now more than ever, people are seeking out products and brands that align with their social, political, and personal values. However, consumers’radar for “greenwashing” is highly tuned – they are quick to recognise when it is a marketing gimmick.
People’s Postcode Lottery could have taken the easy route with this mailing – adopted the high-performing Dutch pack (with all its shiny results), made a few “green” tweaks, slapped an endorsing logo on it and mailed it out. But that did not fit with its CSR commitment. Instead, it went the extra (green) mile to make every inch of the pack sustainable. Not only that, its direct marketing partner Dragonfly sought ways to make the pack even more responsive – ensuring every upgrade was 100% sustainable too.
All the hard work paid off…not only could People’s Postcode Lottery sleep well at night knowing that its mailer was right for the environment, but the pack also smashed response rates to become its best performing in the UK. The pack wasn’t just good for the environment, it was good for the charities that People’s Postcode Lottery support. Proving that green doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice results.
It gets a (sustainable) gold star from us.
"Trailblazing Mail" is where Campaign and Marketreach showcase campaigns that demonstrate the most creative, innovative or effective use of mail, a medium that's providing fresh disruption in an age of screen overload.
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