The Co-Op Childcare Brings in New Sales with UK Mail’s Direct Mailing Service

imail has assisted The Co-operative Childcare, one of the UK’s leading childcare providers, part of The Midcounties Co-operative,  bring in over £2million worth of sales.

Birmingham, UK, 27th February 2014

UK Mail’s hybrid mailing brand imail has assisted The Co-operative Childcare, one of the UK’s leading childcare providers, part of The Midcounties Co-operative,  bring in over £2million worth of sales through utilising imail’s direct mailing service.

The Midcounties Co-Operative is one of the largest independent co-operatives in the UK with gross sales over more than £1bn in a broad range of business from food to travel, pharmacy, funeral and childcare. The childcare division of the group has seen rapid expansion over the last 5 years going from just 6 nurseries to a portfolio of 50 nurseries nationwide. The group enlisted the help of imail for their direct mail marketing needs.

The direct mail marketing campaign saw the two companies work on an effective yet measurable localised direct marketing campaign for the open days each local nursery holds.  Co-Op Childcare hold 3 open days for the nurseries throughout the year. To target potential parents, they purchased specific, tailored data of parents with children of the right age in the local areas.  With the data purchased The Co-Op Childcare then used imail to post out A5 postcards with eye catching artwork to potential customers inviting them to the open days.

The mail fulfilment was carried out by imail with a dedicated account manager monitoring and managing the whole process from data purchasing, artwork upload right through to print and post. This saved The Co-Op Childcare the time and money of manual mail fulfilment and stationary costs.  The response rate through the marketing campaign was successful with 50% of the number of attendees coming through from the postcards sent. The Co-Op Childcare then used imail again for another bulk mailing in January with over 90,000 postcards being sent through imail thus resulting in £2million worth of sales.

Gemma Allardyce, Head of Customer & Brand at The Co-Op Childcare, said, “We understand that parents choose nurseries based on an individual basis and a big national campaign wouldn’t work for us. We needed something local and measurable yet on a large scale. imail housed all of our needs under the one roof, we were able to target potential customers in the areas of all of our nurseries with specific messaging tailored for them. The imail team and service was reliable and made it easy for us to successfully roll out the campaign and minimise our mail fulfilment costs as well as time.”

Andy Barber, General Manager of imail, commented, “We are delighted to be working with The Co-Op Childcare division and see such exceptional results. We look forward to working together again to help continue to grow the business”.

ENDS

For further information please contact: Fahmeda Ahmed, Marketing Communications Executive, UK Mail, 0121 335 1190 or fahmedaahmed@ukmail.com

UK Mail:

The UK Mail Group is the largest independent parcels, mail and logistics services company within the UK, offering quality, yet affordable, delivery solutions both locally and worldwide. With a national network of 55 sites and 3,000 drivers, it is accountable of over 17 per cent of all addressed mail within the UK, making it the busiest alternative to Royal Mail.

imail:

imail was launched in 2008 by UK Mail as the only alternative to the first class postal service and enables users to send letters and postcards with just a click of the mouse. The mail documents are sent electronically to the UK Mail sort centre closest to the destination where they are printed, enveloped and sorted for onward delivery.

imail offers a range of services including, letters, marketing postcards and data, ideal for all sizes of business from SMEs to corporate companies, offering a dynamic desktop to delivery service at a keystroke that provides a range of cost, time and environmental benefits.

Since launch imail has printed and mailed over 40m mail document, the significant growth contributed to imail’s winning the 2013 World Mail Award.

Visit – http://www.imail.co.uk

Midcounties Co-Op Group:

The Midcounties Co-operative is the largest independent co-operative in the UK. They have almost 9,000 colleagues spread across around 450 sites, as well as over 245,000 members who enjoy a share in the profits, as well as knowing they are funding ethical activities and initiatives locally and around the world.

The Midcounties Co-operative has a broad family of businesses, ranging from our large trading groups of food, travel, pharmacy, funeral and childcare to a collection of Post Offices, energy provision, operating the .coop domain name and providing employee benefits.

Some of the businesses operate nationally, but their trading heartlands are Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Buckinghamshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, the West Midlands, Wiltshire and Worcestershire.

For more details contact Zoe Turton at Citypress on 0121 314 4196 or zoe.turton@citypress.co.uk

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