Few brands would be brave enough to ask their customers what new products they should launch and even fewer would be willing to admit that they don't actually know the return on investment from their marketing. But, then, Innocent Drinks is not your average brand.
In just over seven years, founders Richard Reed, Adam Balon and Jon Wright have built one of Britain's most distinctive and popular drink brands, all the while ignoring those who said they were breaking every proven business rule. This year, the firm will have a projected turnover of £50 million,
Until a few years ago, Innocent did very little marketing and didn't even have an ad agency on board, but it did produce a weekly email newsletter, with which it communicated with friends and family, and then with the growing army of fans of its organic fruit smoothies, who it now affectionately refers to as the 'Innocent Family'.
At the end of 2004, the firm was still sending out this newsletter from its own Outlook system: writing it in plain text, putting the email addresses in the 'bcc' boxes and pressing 'send'. Even with just 5,000 people on the list, it was too big a job for the Innocent team on their own.
"When we first started the newsletter, about seven years ago, it was sent to 11 people, at least 50 per cent of whom were mums of the people who worked at Innocent," says communications manager Dan Shrimpton. "It was a couple of stories of a few lines each, saying 'oh, we sold into a shop today' and 'Jon put in his expenses'.
"Over the years, as we've had more going on as a business, the email has a lot more substance, but we've always tried to maintain that light-hearted approach," he adds.
Innocent has clearly managed that as its most recent email begins: 'Autumn is inescapably approaching. There's plenty of it to love - crunchy leaves, drinking tea with purpose and getting your jumpers out from under the bed. Make sure you get out for some bracing walks, even if it means you miss a couple of these email updates. Off you go."
The newsletter goes on to mention that the UN International Day of Peace is coming up and it supplies a link to the organisers' Peace One Day web site. Then, three paragraphs into the email, there is a cursory attempt to promote Innocent's brand new blackcurrant and gooseberry smoothie, which tails off into a rather tall tale about 18th Century 'gooseberry clubs', where people would, allegedly, congregate to compare the fruit they grew.
Then, there's mention of the fact that Watford FC has started stocking the drinks, followed by a suggestion that their form should pick up immediately ('they've got Wigan on Saturday - three points in the bag without a doubt, Brian'), and then an offer of bobbles to anyone who has failed to find any to make their Supergran hats.
Invaluable tool
To an outsider, the e-newsletter may seem a bit of fun, with no real sales objective or business value, but it has proven to be a crucial tool for the brand. Over the last couple of years, in particular, it has helped the company to road test everything from TV ads to new drink flavours.
Sent out every Wednesday lunchtime, the newsletter has about 50,000 recipients. By Shrimpton's admission, Innocent has never quite got round to doing the usual standard things like calculating ROI. While many companies might have decided to outsource the whole thing by now, the email copy is still mainly written by Innocent's long-serving head of creative, Dan Germain.
But, two years ago, when the email list started to become too big to manage, Innocent realised it needed some professional help, so it turned to email specialist Pure 360. "Obviously, when it got to a certain point, it became a massive pain because, whoever sent out the email would have their machine churn away for hours," explains Shrimpton. "Also, by the time we got to 5,000 we were like 'hold on, we should be making the most of this, and not just writing the same old codswallop every week".
With its Pure Response system, Pure 360 offered Innocent the ability to drop graphics into a template and improve the look of each email, and also automatic reporting to show how its newsletters were being read. At Pure 360's suggestion, Innocent started offering an email sign-up facility on its site home page (www.innocentdrinks.co.uk) and the list grew quickly.
"All of this stuff was completely amazing to us, having never done any of it before," says Shrimpton. "The suggestion that you could get people to enter their own email address on the site, rather than picking them up at events and entering them all by hand, was just fantastic."
Online dialogue
One key moment in the early days of the Pure 360 collaboration was when Innocent put a survey in an email about a new product the team was considering, and it was astonished by the response it received (see box p60). It quickly realised how committed its fans were to the welfare of the brand and, having established this online dialogue with customers via email, Innocent has never looked back.
"We did our first TV ad in Ireland and we got two people in the office, Stuart and Erin, to do voice-overs for it," says Shrimpton. "We didn't know which one to use, so we put it to a vote through the newsletter and, basically, just used the one that won."
The fact that Innocent's 'job', as Germain recently defined it, is simply to "get the fruit, squash it and put it in a bottle" also means the brand is in a better position than most to respond to customer suggestions. As Shrimpton points out, that's basically the name of the game: "Instead of sitting in an office with a lot of people twiddling their beards and saying, 'hmm, what would the customers like?', it's a lot easier just to ask them."
The fact that Innocent wanted to keep a hands-on approach to its email marketing meant it needed a system that was easy to use. "When I set it up, the first thing was that the system had to be incredibly easy to use," says Pure 360 founder Darren Fell. " Innocent wanted to have something it could manage in-house, so it could create it, proof it and test it internally before it went out. The graphics guys can build the templates in advance, and the marketers can drop in the copy and the pictures without having to know lots and lots of HTML."
Other jobs that were once laborious also became a lot easier. When a new 'family member' signs up via the Innocent site, their details are routed automatically to a list hosted by Pure 360. And, whereas, in the past, the Innocent team member who sent the email would have been besieged by bounce-backs, Pure 360 goes to significant lengths to ensure the list is kept clean and up-to-date, and to minimise a risk that every mass-emailer runs: falling foul of ISPs.
As well as running content through SpamAssassin, Pure 360 tests each newsletter for compatibility with every possible portal, which ensures it looks good, wherever it is delivered. "It's so easy to have something that works fantastically in Outlook, but looks appalling in, say, BT's Talk21," adds Fell.
Perhaps most importantly of all, when the emails go out - every Wednesday at 12pm-1pm - the system monitors every single 'send' and pauses the operation if it receives more than a fixed percentage of hard- and soft-bounces or opt-outs. Where a failure is the result of a fault in sending, Pure's technicians can get on it immediately, so ISPs don't have a chance to respond to bounce-backs by blacklisting the client's IP address.
Reporting lets the client evaluate its email stats by detailing how many emails were delivered successfully, how many failed, how many were opened, and the number of recipients who clicked to any given links or forwarded to a friend, plus other data. The client can also browse a version of the original email, which provides relevant click-through figures alongside each link. "It is almost like a heat-map of how successful the email has been creatively," says Fell.
Different goals
When recipients click through, Innocent can theoretically view a list of their email addresses and other data held on them. But, Innocent is cautious about drilling down too deeply into this data. "I would hate to give the impression that we break down the data and look at everyone - we don't," says Shrimpton. "That would be really Big Brotherish."
In fact, as Shrimpton candidly admits, the impressive technological capabilities of the Pure 360 system are one thing and the extent to which Innocent uses them is quite another. "There is a lot of data in there, but the main thing we do is to look at how many people click on links, purely to tell us what they're interested in," he says. "There is no real rhyme or reason to it, but the lesson it has taught us is don't always just put in serious things about what we do. That's not the interesting stuff for them - they want something to lighten up their day."
The concept of the 'Innocent Family' has now spread beyond the newsletter, across the rest of the web site, on to the side of the drinks packs and out into the real world. But, while the family has grown fast since late 2004, largely as a result of the improved email system, Shrimpton says the aim is not to recruit members for the sake of it. Given the uses to which Innocent puts its 50,000-strong panel of brand advocates, it is easy to see why.
"We want these people to be the people who really drink our drinks," he explains. "We haven't got targets that say 'we want 200,000 people by whenever'. That goes against what we've got. We certainly wouldn't want to water down this great group by bringing in hundreds of thousands of new people who aren't really as interested."
Back on the subject of ROI and hard stats, which most marketers are obsessed with, and Shrimpton is initially sheepish: "We probably should, but we're not too great at that kind of thing," he says.
Yet, while Innocent's approach to email is as unique as its approach to pretty much everything else, the company clearly sees value in maintaining regular dialogue with consumers. "I think the value of this is obvious and I really don't think you have to spend ages on some spreadsheet to justify it."
INNOCENT RECRUITS BRAND ADVOCATES VIA E-NEWSLETTER
Innocent was still exploring the possibilities of its PureResponse system when it stumbled across something that would, without too much exaggeration, change the brand's life.
"We were thinking about doing some super-smoothies with functional benefits, so we put in (the email) a survey, asking a few questions about what ingredients people would like," says Dan Shrimpton.
"The number of people who clicked on it was absolutely phenomenal," he reveals.
Shrimpton recalls that the response rate was "something ridiculous, like 40-50 per cent of the people who opened the email did the survey".
The experiment was something of a Damascus moment for the company. "We realised that these are hardcore brand advocates and they're willing to help."
Armed with the realisation, Innocent developed the concept of the 'Innocent family', which was driven by the email newsletter, but amounted to more than just a marketing gimmick.
Members are invited to submit their own content and contribute to a blog on the Innocent web site.
For its own part, the brand sends them Christmas gifts and has recently used the email to experiment with money-off vouchers.
"It goes across our whole business, and it is about creating and nurturing a family of advocates - people who love us - and showing them a bit of love back again," says Shrimpton.
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