Creating clever campaigns to make the everyday interesting

ParcelHero is an international courier service with excellent USPs in affordability, reliability and speed. But let’s face it, nobody finds packages sexy. Notwithstanding the fact that logistics is an industry whose entire aim is to go unnoticed.

USPs really sell the company once you know about it, but how do you get potential customers interested to begin with? The answer for ParcelHero is content. One of our biggest customer bases is eBay merchants. These crafty, creative, artistic and inspiring individuals thrive on the opportunity to make something different, and we can deliver it.

So, in the run-up to Christmas last year we launched an advent calendar campaign to raise money for global charity Oxfam. We found a list of art & craft bloggers through Vuelio’s extensive media database and sent them a simple brief to turn a plain, wooden box into a unique piece of art that a member of the public could bid on via our eBay site.

The collection of 24 boxes sold for nearly £1,000, which was great for Oxfam and great for the artists involved. In this scenario, getting the artist’s buy-in was achieved by not just involving them in the campaign, but by focussing the campaign around them. We were simply the platform that facilitated artists in showcasing their work to a larger audience. This was one of the key drivers for their participation in taking part in the campaign. In turn, their participants resulted in great brand awareness for us.

Who knew parcel delivery could be so creative? Although the advent calendar really worked for us, this doesn’t mean we didn’t face some difficulties on the way. The primary issue was auctioning the boxes. Looking back on it instead of doing them as one big auction we may have been able to raise even more money for Oxfam by selling them individually.

The second was selecting the artists – we had a lot of people wanting to get involved, choosing the right ones proved difficult. Following outreach best practice we reached out to more participants than we expected to participate, but the concept and fundraising angle proved incredibly popular with bloggers, leading to us almost being oversubscribed. And as the campaign progressed our customer services department was inundated with calls from people wanting to buy the boxes, despite the auction being clearly featured on the site. When planning any campaign we highly recommend preparing for both high and low levels of interest.

Understanding what you learnt post-campaign is one of the most important things you must do – what you did right, what did wrong, what should be improved etc. We took these learnings and applied it to our following campaign. So as Mother’s Day approached, we wanted to do something focused on a parental audience and kicking off ParcelHero fundraising for our new charity partner, Great Ormond Street Hospital (G.O.S.H.). After months of work, we’re proud to be able to introduce #Mumblesale: ‘An online jumble sale for mums, raising money for G.O.S.H.’. All funds raised go straight to the London-based hospital, which specialises in treating children and has helped us to secure donations from big brand partners including Playmobil, Vtech and Fisher Price, who will also be promoting the Mumblesale auction.

Creating content in a challenging industry isn’t hard, but it does involve thorough research, a lot of effort and time. The benefits of doing so ensure stronger content and informing customers in a more compelling way.