Voter Variations: How the BBC delivered election results – as the votes were counted – for 650 constituencies across the UK

0:00: Stay up all night watching people counting papers. 

 0:03: Yeah, and people did as well. 

 0:04: We had a couple of members of the team that, one of the members of the team, someone used to work for a political party, and her and her partner made a whole thing out of it. 

 0:11: They got food in, they stayed up all night, watched the results. 

 0:14: Welcome to Email swipes, where we peek behind the scenes at the emails that catch your attention and earn their place in your swipe file. 

 0:21: Every other week, we’ll talk to an email expert about an experiment they ran, and in the The following episode, we’ll dive into the strategies and methods used in the email so you can inform and inspire your own email work. 

 0:31: I’m Miki Elvas, the copywriter behind winning emails for 8 and 9 figure sassin e-commerce brands like Shopify, For Sigmatic, and Sprout Social. 

 0:39: And I know that hearing the background stories to these emails will help you turn pie in the sky insights into plug and play actions. 

 0:45: Ready to make inspiration tactical? 

 0:47: Let’s go. 

 0:48: First, let’s read today’s email. 

 0:51: Hello. 

 0:52: As the votes are counted, the BBC brings you the latest election news with the result from your constituency and live coverage as the new government is formed. 

 1:00: Follow the latest election news. 

 1:02: Election 2024 result for Hertford and Stoport counting underway after 253 of 650 seats declared. 

 1:09: Labor gain, top five candidates. 

 1:12: Vote share changed since 2019. 

 1:15: Hertford and Stortford. 

 1:17: Data corrected time of Constituency displayed is based on the postcode linked to your BBC account, not your constituency, please update your postcode. 

 1:27: Search another area, click below to enter your postcode or the name of your constituency, e.g. DE11RS or Derby. 

 1:34: Search Election 2024. 

 1:36: Get the latest general election news. 

 1:38: Watch live. 

 1:40: Jay, thank you so much for joining. 

 1:42: Tell us who you are and what you do. 

 1:44: I’m Jay Oram. 

 1:45: I’m the head of development at a digital agency called Action Rocket. 

 1:49: We specialize in email and CRM and I mean, I basically just play with email code all day trying to figure out how to make things look cool. 

 1:56: That’s the main aim, and look after my team that also do really cool stuff. 

 1:59: Oh, so you also have like a management role as well. 

 2:02: Yeah, yeah, so, there’s a team of 5 of us who are all developers and I managed the whole team and then just generally look after anything at the agency that involves code. 

 2:10: So if the strategy team, the design team, clients want consulting on anything from email, HTML to ESP migrations, websites, anything basically, I’m here to help. 

 2:20: Cool. 

 2:21: Yeah, I didn’t know there was a CRM component also, so you also manage the, like, what do you mean when you say CRM? 

 2:28: So from if a customer comes to us with an idea, then we try and develop it so that it kind of helps them out from strategy, copy, design, and code. 

 2:36: But then from a CRM we do campaign planning, automation, setting up things in different ESPs and stuff like that. 

 2:42: That’s probably more of my side of things, connecting databases and AP. 

 2:46: APIs and things to make stuff work in app messages, the whole omnichannel, multi-channel, all that stuff, putting it all together. 

 2:52: That’s amazing. 

 2:53: That’s so cool. 

 2:54: Omnichannel is like the, I mean, it’s been like this for years where everybody’s like, you have to go omnichannel, you have to go omnichannel, but I feel like it’s finally happening where people are finally doing it, so it’s nice. 

 3:04: Yeah, we get a whole range of people and a fun thing about being an action rocket is we don’t have a set audience or a set client. 

 3:10: So we’ve got some people that are like FM FCMG fast moving consumer FMF FMCG whatever it is, that one, yeah, we have those, we also have big. 

 3:21: Enterprise clients, we have clients that are like the BBC that have no retail, so they don’t sell anything. 

 3:27: So everyone has a different way of doing what everyone thinks omnichannel is or multi-channel or whatever it is. 

 3:32: So everyone has a different reason for doing it. 

 3:34: So it’s quite nice to work with so many different, like a range of clients. 

 3:38: And then my favorite part as well is get to help them with all their technology as well. 

 3:42: So we can bring in stuff that helps them. 

 3:44: So someone might want to use WhatsApp for the first time, or they’re looking at social media or Google Ads and they’ve never thought about it and how we can tie it all together and then I can help that way. 

 3:54: Wow, that’s so cool. 

 3:55: How do you serve so many different types of markets without losing? 

 4:00: I mean, not losing anything without. 

 4:02: I guess it’s just, you know, how do you have the headspace for giant enterprise clients, but then also these smaller consumer brands? 

 4:09: How do you track of it all? 

 4:10: Yeah, I mean, we split up the task really well, so the strategy team, they probably have their own niches that they know a little bit more about. 

 4:16: And what we do is we give all of our team the time to learn brands. 

 4:21: So we don’t have loads of clients. 

 4:23: We only have, I don’t know, say 1015 clients that are with us all the time, and we know those brands really well. 

 4:29: And then when a new brand starts with us. 

 4:31: We’ll go for like a thorough onboarding with the branding. 

 4:34: They’ll get a dedicated member of team or a couple of members of team that will be with them. 

 4:38: So they’re the experts. 

 4:40: And then my role kind of comes in as, this isn’t working, we want to do this, how do we do it? 

 4:45: And then I just get a top level. 

 4:46: So I might not know. 

 4:47: Like one of the brands that we work with is TurboTax in the US. 

 4:50: So I don’t necessarily know every single tax product that they do, as well as like our strategy team does. 

 4:57: American tax as well. 

 4:59: No, sorry. 

 5:00: But some of our team members do learn it. 

 5:02: They literally, like, they’re there for, on the, they’re on all the all the webinars, learning everything. 

 5:06: They know as much about tax as the team at TurboTax does. 

 5:09: And then they come to me and they’re like, we want to do this live poll in email or we want to do this thing with live images or something. 

 5:17: And then I’m just like, wicked, I can do that. 

 5:18: I don’t necessarily need to know all the tax stuff for that, but I can make it work. 

 5:22: Wow, nice. 

 5:22: OK. 

 5:23: I do want to dig into what you were saying about BBC not selling anything. 

 5:26: So that’s a very interesting. 

 5:28: A strategy for email because you’re usually selling within email. 

 5:32: So, that’s so interesting to know that your strategy for this particular brand is just engagement and that’s all it is. 

 5:39: Do they ever, I don’t know, include ads or anything or it’s always just we are working for engagement? 

 5:45: Yeah, it’s all just engagement. 

 5:46: So we work with both halves of the BBC team. 

 5:48: So the half that is public studios in the UK is owned by everyone in the UK as like a TV license. 

 5:55: So everyone has to pay it if they want to watch it as a base thing. 

 5:58: Almost like a Netflix subscription that you have to pay if you want to watch TV. 

 6:02: so the BBC get their money that way. 

 6:04: So all they want to do is share their latest programs, their latest documentaries, They have radio stations, they have BBC Sounds, which is like podcasts and radio and stuff. 

 6:14: And then they have iPlayer, which is obviously like TV, films and stuff like that. 

 6:18: And they do come up with new programs and they want to share them and they need to do marketing for them, but their bottom line isn’t money or anything. 

 6:25: It’s literally just come and watch this program. 

 6:27: and it’s all free apart from the TV license bit, but technically it’s all free because everyone has to watch it and it has it anyway. 

 6:33: Wow, that’s so interesting. 

 6:34: So it’s a real shift. 

 6:35: So that’s very cool. 

 6:37: It’s so fun because it means you can really experiment because you’re really working with what the customer wants. 

 6:42: I mean, you can experiment similarly with sales, but it’s just a different kind of experimentation. 

 6:47: That’s very cool. 

 6:47: Yeah, a lot of it is like information led as well. 

 6:50: So like the email that I shared, like the election one, they didn’t really want any. 

 6:54: Specific engagement from it apart from to share the results. 

 6:57: So there wasn’t any real metric of opens is obviously good because I can see people are interested. 

 7:02: But yeah, there wasn’t a specific call to action or anything in that email that made people click through and they didn’t necessarily want people to click through. 

 7:07: The real aim was to get that information out to people and that was the best way to do it. 

 7:11: Yeah, and it’s like just serving the customer because they are looking for that information. 

 7:15: So it’s like here, it’s in your inbox. 

 7:17: There’s no metric for that. 

 7:20: OK, so let’s talk about this email. 

 7:22: So the strategy team came to you and said we want to do this. 

 7:25: We want to put the results within the email. 

 7:27: Yeah, so basically the BBC come to us and they were like, we have however a million people, they’re all voters. 

 7:34: We know they’re all going to get some kind of results and we want to share that the BBC are covering the election, so we want to make sure people know that they’ve got the information and who won in their area. 

 7:44: We want to make it really personalized, look at all of that specific data, so. 

 7:48: How could we do that? 

 7:50: And with the last election in 2019, I think it was, we kind of played with the idea of putting the information in the email with some live data. 

 7:58: So like pulling in who won, but not to this in-depth amount. 

 8:02: So showing the different percentages who turn out, the different parties graphically showing things. 

 8:08: So yeah, so the strategy team and the BBC team kind of chatted along with myself and the designers to try and figure out how could we best just give this information over. 

 8:17: So that was The idea came from of like, everyone wants to get the results, how do we do it? 

 8:21: And then another interesting angle was they wanted to do it live. 

 8:24: So as soon as the results were published, they wanted it to be straight in people’s inbox. 

 8:29: So in England, the way it works is every constituency, which is like a small area, they count their own votes. 

 8:36: They then get someone to check it, then they publish the votes, and then that goes to kind of like a team that shares the data to all the news channels. 

 8:44: So the BBC gets that data as soon as it’s counted. 

 8:47: So the challenge was how do we get that data. 

 8:50: Into an image live, get it all ready in the email in Salesforce, trigger it to send to your constituency as soon as it was done. 

 8:59: And this was all happening at 1 a.m., 20 a.m. in the morning. 

 9:02: So it was all happening, yeah, in real time. 

 9:04: Yeah. 

 9:05: So there was lots and loads of a range of challenges from technically, how do we take live data, create it as an image, how do we then put the image in the email? 

 9:15: How do we trigger that email? 

 9:17: How do we make sure it goes to the right people? 

 9:18: How do we get all that information in the email, and then how do we automate it so that we don’t have to be up at 1 a.m. so that to make sure it goes out as well. 

 9:25: And testing it, how do you test it when it’s not really yet? 

 9:29: Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. 

 9:31: We worked with the data team, so they have a specific data team over at the BBC who manage the election data. 

 9:36: So they were doing tests like over like 24 hours, they were doing like a sped up test. 

 9:41: So instead of it coming every hour, it came every half an hour, the data or something. 

 9:44: So we participated in a couple of those lives. 

 9:47: where we just sent out the emails to our test email addresses to be like, oh, it’s taking the data, it’s working it out. 

 9:52: That’s all cool. 

 9:53: So that was fine. 

 9:54: Actually testing it on the night, obviously, is quite a difficult thing. 

 9:57: So, I was online at midnight to get the first email to see what happened. 

 10:01: And we did have a bit of a blip right at the very beginning where the BBC data team actually inputted the data wrong. 

 10:07: Oh no. 

 10:07: Yeah. 

 10:08: So, we’d planned for every eventuality, including in that one, but we wasn’t expecting it to happen straight away. 

 10:13: Right, that’s so disappointing. 

 10:16: Yeah. 

 10:16: So we had to like scrub the image, reupload the image, reset the trigger, get that going all as quick as possible so that when the next one come in, we were ready for the next one to come out. 

 10:26: And then there was things like, you can have recounts. 

 10:29: So even though they publish a live result and say, like, this is the final result, a couple of hours later, they can come back and be like, oh, actually, It’s slightly different now. 

 10:37: We’ve done something wrong or, yeah, we want to change something. 

 10:40: So then we got updates on that on that. 

 10:42: So then we had to figure out, we kind of knew how to do it, but we had to set a process aside to do it, and I was on hand to help. 

 10:47: So I was on call overnight, but luckily, I only had a little bit at the beginning and then I think it was like 4 or 5 a.m. in the morning. 

 10:54: I had a couple of other things, but that was all. 

 10:57: Wow, it’s so cool. 

 10:58: See, as soon as you send me this email and I looked at it, I was like, wow, this is a complicated email. 

 11:03: But The average individual who receives it is just like, oh, OK, election results, OK, great, they’re in my email, that’s wonderful. 

 11:10: They don’t realize how much goes into it. 

 11:14: I didn’t even realize how much went into it, the overnight thing and everything, and it’s so cool how you were preparing for every eventuality. 

 11:19: So did you prepare like an apology email where you said, oops, sorry, data is wrong, and you sent that in that instance? 

 11:26: Yeah, so we had a corrections email. 

 11:28: That was exactly that, that was. 

 11:29: Data’s wrong. 

 11:30: We’re gonna resend it. 

 11:32: We’ve resent it to you. 

 11:33: This is the correct data. 

 11:34: And then we also had just lots of eventualities. 

 11:37: What happens if the data doesn’t ever come? 

 11:39: What do we do if that happens? 

 11:40: Can we do it manually? 

 11:42: So, basically, the way it was set up was the data got published by the team. 

 11:45: Our tool that we built internally took that data, made it into an image, and then uploaded it to Salesforce. 

 11:50: So that all happened automated, but we had every step of that could be manual. 

 11:55: As well. 

 11:55: So you could input the data manually to say, I don’t know, label one or whatever it was, create that image, download the image to your computer and then upload it to Taworce and then just manually make the image. 

 12:07: So there’s 650 constituencies. 

 12:10: So no one wanted to be doing that 650 times overnight. 

 12:12: As well as just being able to do it completely manually, we created a load of tools. 

 12:16: So, like a tool to input the data and then get the image. 

 12:21: Made a tool that uploaded an image to Salesforce and put it in the right email and a tool to kind of manage all of that going on as well as a fullback page that we had of all the images being made if Salesforce broke, which is not really gonna happen, but it could have done. 

 12:36: So yeah, so we had a page that we hosted on our site that had all of the images, all of the data so that we could deal with it. 

 12:43: Then we had another page on Salesforce that showed. 

 12:46: All of the images live as they came in, so you could check and make sure they were working. 

 12:50: And then another page which had a report of the emails that had been sent, who they’d been sent to, what time they’d been sent. 

 12:57: If something was going wrong, we had all the places that we could look and check what was going on. 

 13:02: And then we had a Slack channel on our action rocket Slack to update us with errors. 

 13:06: So if there was an error, we’d get a ping. 

 13:08: Something’s not right. 

 13:09: Can you have a look at it? 

 13:10: And then The BBC team, they actually decided they wanted to stay up for 24 hours. 

 13:14: So they just went to the BBC studios, sat there listening to the news. 

 13:19: The team that did it love elections, so they were quite happy to sit there. 

 13:22: Right. 

 13:23: I was thinking like, oh, I guess it’s the type, you know, that if you work for the BBC, you want to hear the elections live. 

 13:28: Exactly. 

 13:29: Yeah, they want to be in there. 

 13:29: They want to be with the BBC team, seeing what’s going on. 

 13:32: He all the bombshells of people winning and stuff. 

 13:34: So they were very happy to do it anyway. 

 13:36: But they had an online meeting link that was just on constantly. 

 13:40: So then the one at 4 a.m. where there was a correction and they couldn’t get an image to work or something, they just messaged me on WhatsApp. 

 13:47: I just got up, went and joined their online meeting and was like, OK, what’s happening? 

 13:51: Let’s do it now, figure it out. 

 13:53: And so all of that pre-planning meant that when stuff did go wrong, it just meant that it was like a 5, 10 minute job instead of a couple of hours or something. 

 14:00: It was kind of nice that way. 

 14:02: Yeah, it’s it’s amazing all the planning that went in advance, but how it really, really paid off. 

 14:06: I mean, obviously not every eventuality, but it’s great. 

 14:11: That’s very cool. 

 14:12: So do they have a competitor that this was OK, we really want to stand out so people are following the BBC for the election news? 

 14:19: They are the main channel where people get their election results. 

 14:23: So the news channels that are out there were competing. 

 14:26: Sky News or other news outlets like that were showing it on TV, but as far as we know, no one else was emailing the data out to anyone, so no one else was having it. 

 14:35: Another thing is The BBC is unique that they have that data on what constituency you’re in. 

 14:40: So they have your address when you sign up to be a member of BBC. 

 14:45: So they can work out from your address what area you’re in. 

 14:48: Even in your area, there’s sometimes a couple of different constituencies, so they could work it out granually down to the data of where you were. 

 14:54: So I think BBC are possibly the only people who have access to that data. 

 14:58: So they would be in a unique position of being a news outlet that gets that data and has the data for the people so they can put it all together and then send it out. 

 15:05: And they already have. 

 15:06: Email permission because of all the other emails they sent. 

 15:08: So in terms of the email itself, no other competing, but for people who wanted to watch the results, there was a few different options. 

 15:15: So on the lead up to this email, there was a BBC News newsletter specifically set up for elections that you could sign up for, and I think it was daily on the kind of couple of months up. 

 15:24: You got all the updates of everything that was going on in the election, and they were constantly plugging that it would be 24 hours live on the news channel. 

 15:30: You can watch it, see what’s going on, and that they would get the results live and stuff like that. 

 15:35: And then for the real election nerds, they have live webcams of people actually counting the votes. 

 15:42: So people that are literally pulling the votes out, counting them, and then taking them to the front and then, yeah, yeah, and you can just watch it happening like, because it just happens in village halls and stuff around the country. 

 15:50: It’s just a load of random people counting paper, but the hardcore audience that want to see it, it was all there on the BBC. 

 15:55: So they were definitely the go to place for it. 

 15:59: stay up all night watching people counting papers. 

 16:02: Yeah, and people did as well. 

 16:03: We had a couple of members of the team that one of the members of the team, someone who used to work for a political party, and her and her partner made a whole thing out of it. 

 16:10: They got food in, they stayed up all night, watched the results. 

 16:13: Super Bowl party. 

 16:14: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. 

 16:16: So it’s a thing. 

 16:18: Wow, that’s so interesting. 

 16:19: Fun, fun. 

 16:20: OK, so I had a couple of questions on the actual email. 

 16:23: The first one was I noticed there’s no first name when clearly you have all this personalization data. 

 16:28: Is that just because this was like a test email, or did you not include first name for some reason? 

 16:33: No, we didn’t include first name. 

 16:34: We just wanted it to be about the election results, and we wasn’t really looking at the other parts of the personalization. 

 16:39: And also, I think the data that they do have on first name may not be 100% correct realistically, because Yeah, you sign up for like the channels with your email address and things like that, and you might put your name in, but multiple people can be on that account, like my own account, my wife’s on it, my daughter’s on it, so she’s working, watching kids programs and stuff. 

 16:59: So I think my name is on the account, and I think it’s my email address, but there’s a chance that my name could be on the account, but my wife’s email address could be the email address we signed up with. 

 17:08: So even though they do. 

 17:10: Have the data, I think that bit they’re not 100% sure on. 

 17:14: I think because it was so personalized with the other stuff, so we’ve got your area, we’ve got your results and that kind of thing. 

 17:19: I don’t think they were thinking of first name. 

 17:21: 100%. 

 17:22: It’s like that classic example of personalization is not first name, you know, it’s providing content that is relevant and interesting for your audience instead of just, oh, we got your first name right. 

 17:31: Now you’re going to like the rest of this email, aren’t you? 

 17:34: Yeah, yeah, it was almost more personalized than first name, I guess, maybe when you think about it, yeah. 

 17:38: That’s kind of what I was wondering was like, was it not necessary in this case? 

 17:41: And also they just want to get to it. 

 17:43: They can skip the whole beginning. 

 17:44: Yeah, so I’ve only got like tests in my inbox that I can see quickly. 

 17:47: But when we sent the results, I know that we can hide a bit of text in there as like a preview text. 

 17:52: And in there, we did add who the winner is in your constituency. 

 17:56: And we also did a cool test thing where we hid a little bit more text in there than we would normally, because what we wanted to do was if someone asked Siri or something if they had an email, then it would read it out with that information. 

 18:10: Yeah. 

 18:10: So you wouldn’t even have to open the email to get Labour one in your. 

 18:12: area or whatever it is. 

 18:13: So we tested that. 

 18:14: So we focused on those bits of personalization to do that. 

 18:16: And then I think we were toying with the idea of even the subject line, even having the answer in so that you didn’t even have to open the email. 

 18:22: But I think in the end, it was probably like, actually, most people probably do want to open the email and see the results and see the breakdown and stuff. 

 18:28: So we didn’t need to put it in the subject line. 

 18:30: See, that’s that’s kind of like going back to that idea that you don’t need people to even open. 

 18:35: You just need to give them the information that they want. 

 18:37: So you can put everything in the subject line. 

 18:40: Yeah, I mean, although the BBC. 

 18:42: Want just to give content. 

 18:44: I think they do need to justify the amount of work that goes into it as well. 

 18:47: So if no one opened the email, they’d be like, oh my God, what happened? 

 18:50: even though everyone did get the info. 

 18:52: So I guess there is always in the back of your head like you do need some kind of metric to measure. 

 18:57: I think also they want to know the winner, but they also, they want to know more, you know, OK, so how much did they win by and who else? 

 19:04: then, you know, if it was in the subject line, they would have gotten that like, OK, I got it, and then they would have opened it anyway, so it would have worked. 

 19:11: Wait, so what was the subject line? 

 19:13: So it was election results in, and then your area. 

 19:17: So it was just election results. 

 19:18: Mine was Bishop Stortford and East Hearts because that’s the area I’m in. 

 19:21: So it was just election results in East Hearts, basically. 

 19:25: So it’s just the area. 

 19:26: And then the preview was plus live election news. 

 19:28: Yeah, nice and clear so people know exactly what they’re getting it. 

 19:35: Did you see from the open metrics like people opening it live then, or did most people check it in the morning? 

 19:41: Yeah, I mean, the majority of people checked me in the morning, but we were very surprised that at 2 a.m. there was a big spike in the opens. 

 19:47: So people were obviously, I don’t know, maybe they were opening their emails at that time in the morning and they just happened to see that one, or maybe they were waiting for it. 

 19:53: Yeah, yeah, but actually, yeah. 

 19:55: So yeah, it was exciting at the time. 

 19:56: OK, so what happens when they click at the bottom, wrong postcode, update your account settings? 

 20:01: Did it trigger an email? 

 20:02: Yeah, so if they clicked on that and then updated their account settings and the result hadn’t been published, then they would have got the result later on. 

 20:09: If it had already been published, we weren’t able to resend them the results. 

 20:14: But on that page where they did update it, there was a way that they could just check out the results. 

 20:18: So if it was already there, they could see it. 

 20:20: I really thought of everything. 

 20:22: Try to, yeah. 

 20:23: That’s so great. 

 20:24: And then the search where they can look at other constituencies that takes them to the live election page. 

 20:31: Yeah, so another page which the BBC had just set up anyway for anyone to go on and search for results. 

 20:36: So for instance, I used to live in Baran and Dagnam, which is another constituency that was highly contested and could have gone either like left or right in lots of different ways. 

 20:46: So it was nice to see where, if that had been declared and which way it had gone to kind of figure out how that was going, because obviously we were showing where you lived now, or like if your parents live or something, I don’t know. 

 20:56: Yeah, or if you had just moved, but you hadn’t updated your account or. 

 20:59: Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. 

 21:00: We did send out a couple of emails beforehand which had like update your information, and we did send out just a general kind of make sure your data’s up to date and didn’t mention the election at all, just so people could update it with their correct postcode for anything in the future, which did get quite a good rate of people clicking through and updating their, their data because the BBC don’t really ask you to update it very often. 

 21:20: So you could have signed up 10 years ago and moved 10 times and no one. 

 21:25: You wouldn’t know. 

 21:26: So until you actually got an email like that, I guess it wouldn’t have come up. 

 21:29: Cool. 

 21:29: You really, really thought of everything even beforehand, like updated the address, so it’s accurate. 

 21:34: It’s so cool. 

 21:34: OK, so what was the feedback like? 

 21:36: Did anyone hit reply and say like, oh thanks, or it’s not really. 

 21:40: I don’t, I don’t think anyone replied actually, not that I know of anyway. 

 21:43: I’d have to ask the BBC teams. 

 21:44: I can’t imagine replying to an email like that. 

 21:46: It feels too official where I wouldn’t think that there would be somebody who would appreciate a reply that I would think. 

 21:52: Reply if I was like a normal non-email person. 

 21:55: So it’s not surprising. 

 21:56: No, I think we saw people taking screenshots, sharing things and doing things like sharing the results and stuff in their area and things like that. 

 22:02: And we saw screenshots of the email. 

 22:04: So we saw that it was well received from people who were interested in that kind of thing. 

 22:08: And then, yeah, the team did say that the open rate was quite, really quite high for an email. 

 22:12: So, yeah, it did perform well. 

 22:14: Like the click through, but didn’t really go anywhere, kind of thing, cause, yeah, it was like, Watch live or check other areas. 

 22:20: So if people weren’t interested in that and they just wanted their area, then they had nowhere to go. 

 22:25: So, yeah, yeah, it was all there for them. 

 22:27: Yeah. 

 22:27: But the fact that they were sharing it meant that they really appreciated the way that you broke it down for them and the immediacy of it and the clarity of it. 

 22:33: Yeah. 

 22:34: So, if you went to the BBC website, they have this information and more. 

 22:38: So there’s so much information. 

 22:40: So I think when we were working with the design team and the data team, we tried to just take the data that people Actually really boiled down to what they needed to know, cause there’s endless things that we could do from what it was versus this vote, what it was the first couple of votes to go, stuff like that. 

 22:54: So having the ability to narrow it down to exactly what someone wanted to hear and at the right time was definitely, yeah. 

 23:02: Like, I hate it when people say the right message, the right time, the right person, kind of thing. 

 23:06: Because like, it’s almost an impossible thing. 

 23:08: So I think this tries to do it, but it doesn’t really achieve, like, it achieves. 

 23:12: Getting the data to someone at the right time cause it’s exactly when the results come out. 

 23:16: So it was super live. 

 23:17: And then it was the right data if it happened to be the right postcode and it was right, the right one, I guess. 

 23:22: And then the right person, obviously, because they’re the person that wants to receive that information. 

 23:25: So it got all that stuff. 

 23:26: But the data that was in there was the right stuff you need. 

 23:29: It was almost like the right stuff you needed to know about the election if you had no interest in the election. 

 23:33: So, like, if you turned up at work the next day and someone was like, Oh my God, did you see the result in our area, then you have the same. 

 23:39: To be like, oh yeah, Labor one and it was a turnover and can’t believe only 80% of people turned out, you’ve got enough ammunition to send like, you know what you’re talking about really. 

 23:48: You can be part of the conversation. 

 23:51: That’s great. 

 23:52: So what are your plans for next election period? 

 23:54: Are you going to do something similar? 

 23:56: Wow, I think about it. 

 23:58: Yeah, it’s a big job. 

 24:00: It’s every 5 years or so, and so I think we’ve got a little while to have to think about it, Yeah, but what we would like to do is, even though we knew the election was coming, the problem is that in the UK the election happens 6 weeks after they announce it. 

 24:16: So, yeah, you only ever have 6 weeks to come. 

 24:19: Yeah. 

 24:20: So we knew it was coming, but ideally, we’d like to plan this a little bit further in advance. 

 24:25: So we know it’s gonna happen in about 5 years. 

 24:27: So 12 months beforehand, let’s have a look and think, right, what could we do? 

 24:31: Because we realized that we wanted to have more emails. 

 24:34: Before and after to talk about the election and help inform voters on what they wanted to hear. 

 24:40: So we’ve got the data of their constituency. 

 24:42: We know the parties that are going to be there. 

 24:45: We know the general reason that parties exist, why they believe this, why they believe that. 

 24:49: So why not create a series of emails giving the data to people before they go and vote. 

 24:55: We really wanted to help people learn. 

 24:57: about that. 

 24:58: another thing that happened was the constituencies similar to like in the US where they have the different areas get drawn in a different way so different voters can vote. 

 25:06: They have that every now and again in the UK. 

 25:08: And when that happened, we wanted to inform people about that as well. 

 25:12: It was just a news article and it got mentioned in a couple of emails, just like the general emails, but we really wanted to highlight it a bit more and Tell people a bit more about it, but we didn’t really have time and we wanted to do it in a nice way for people and it didn’t really come across. 

 25:26: So yeah, next time, like a program leading up to the election, and then also a recap after. 

 25:31: So I think because we got so stuck into this email and the team was so kind of not burnt out, but there was so much going on, there wasn’t a lot of fault for like, how do we send an email with a. 

 25:40: recap or how do we send an email a week later to say this is all that what happened and highlighting all the things that happened during the election stuff. 

 25:48: Because also, when they do announce the results at 2 a.m., the people that are running in that constituency are there to say they’ve won. 

 25:56: And some of those results, they’re all filmed and the BBC filmed it all and there were some great images of like It’s such a British thing, but there’s one person running who’s called Count Binface, and he’s literally a man who just wears like a big dustbin on his head, has a cape. 

 26:11: It’s all dressed up. 

 26:12: He always runs in an area which is a really high profile one, so like where the Prime Minister’s going to be running or something like that. 

 26:19: So he’s always getting the attention. 

 26:20: And there’s a few characters like that across, so it would almost be nice to highlight those things going on. 

 26:25: Well. 

 26:25: So if you weren’t as involved as we were, maybe you wouldn’t have seen some of those things going on. 

 26:30: So it would be nice to kind of, this was your election, or that would have been cool. 

 26:34: So all of that is going to work for next time. 

 26:37: Gotcha. 

 26:37: Cool. 

 26:38: And also, 5 years is such a long time in the world. 

 26:40: Like, you might be able to just stream the video, you know, the live counting for everyone, and they can opt into whatever level of intense. 

 26:48: Yeah, we want. 

 26:49: So we have got amp for email set up for BBC. 

 26:52: so amp for email does mean that we can actually stream live data into an email. 

 26:56: So there was talks of, do we just do it live live? 

 27:00: Do we literally, you have one email and you can open it and you can watch all the constituencies come in and you can see who’s winning and they have like a leader table and stuff like that. 

 27:09: But because it was such a short lead time. 

 27:11: From they announced it to being live, that 6 weeks was quite hectic already. 

 27:15: And in order for us to get that working, we’d need more help from the data team on the BBC side. 

 27:19: And they had surprisingly, at that point, they had Wimbledon, the Olympics, and the election all happening. 

 27:26: So, yeah, they didn’t have much spare time. 

 27:28: So to be like, oh yeah, could we just add another data stream, please? 

 27:32: Well it might have been a bit too much of an ask, yeah. 

 27:35: But yeah, if we can stream live to an email, then that would be awesome. 

 27:38: Yeah. 

 27:39: I could see that could be interesting where, you know, the people who just want like the basic results so that they’re kind of feel involved could get something like this, and then the people who really want more detail can get both because there is something really nice. 

 27:50: It’s about just having the results laid out where you don’t have to watch it. 

 27:53: It’s just there for you to see. 

 27:55: So that could be fun to play with. 

 27:57: Definitely. 

 27:58: Awesome. 

 27:58: This is so interesting. 

 27:59: It’s so amazing, the broadness of what you can do with email. 

 28:04: It’s just, it’s very, very cool. 

 28:06: That’s kind of the plan for everything we do is to try and push email that a little bit more. 

 28:11: And because we worked with the BBC for so long, they almost let us have a little bit of free reign or go like a little bit crazy sometimes. 

 28:17: So yeah, we’ve done like, when Doctor Who come out, we got to do like an interactive quiz email to put things together and they were like, wow, this is awesome. 

 28:23: How, how do you do that? 

 28:24: So that was cool. 

 28:26: And then we couldn’t really apply that to the election. 

 28:28: So we like did something else. 

 28:29: So, yeah, in building a tool that can create this image live from the data, get it up and get the emails sent pretty quick. 

 28:36: BBC allowing us to do that is a nice thing that we get to work on. 

 28:40: Although we, the majority of our time is working on coding emails, allowing us to break out from that and do crazy stuff like this is always fun. 

 28:47: Yeah, it’s amazing. 

 28:48: It’s such a fun challenge. 

 28:50: OK, so what are your favorite brands to call email inspiration from? 

 28:55: I really like Doctor Squatch, the Sasquatch kind of brand. 

 28:58: One of the things I really like about their emails is they’re really on trend. 

 29:01: So if something happens in the news, like within a week or two, they would have commented on it, or if there’s a big, Thing going on, they get the emails out really quickly. 

 29:09: So they had like a Marvel Avengers soap, which doesn’t sound very exciting, but like it launched and like, well, for Marvel Avengers fans, it sure is. 

 29:18: Well, exactly, yeah, yeah. 

 29:19: So that was really cool. 

 29:20: And then they’re really engaging, so like, how do you talk about soap and make it interesting? 

 29:25: That’s probably a really difficult thing, but every single email I get from them I open and I look at it all the way through and so that doesn’t happen very often. 

 29:32: And then I always like getting emails from, I mean, obviously you had Megan on. 

 29:36: Before from email and acid and the Mailjetin team. 

 29:40: So getting emails from them to see like what she’s up to figuring out how she’s working on things. 

 29:45: Luckily, I get a sneak peek every now and again when she’s like, Oh, I’m trying to figure this out. 

 29:48: How can we do it? 

 29:49: And I’m like, Oh yeah, I can help you, but I never get to see the whole email. 

 29:52: So it’s kind of fun to see those. 

 29:54: So yeah, so those are the kind of brands. 

 29:55: But in my work email, I keep to inboxer, so I read every single email that comes through. 

 30:01: So I get to see a lot of things. 

 30:02: I probably should have named a brand I work with, but I, I didn’t even think about that. 

 30:08: Well, of course you’re going to love those. 

 30:09: Yeah, I mean, I love those, obviously, yeah, but yeah, everyone else is as well. 

 30:12: I get involved. 

 30:14: Yeah, when you’re in the weeds yourself, you don’t think like, oh yeah, this is inspiration because you were the one who worked on it. 

 30:19: So yeah, it makes sense. 

 30:21: You work across so many different industries, so reading all the emails from all the different. 

 30:26: Industries, that’s what’s going to give you the inspiration. 

 30:28: And also like just generally trying to figure out what’s going on in email, who’s doing new things, what’s possible, that kind of thing is, that’s what keeps me looking. 

 30:35: And I, yeah, I’m probably one of the only people that reads the promotions tab in Gmail almost religiously. 

 30:40: So I’m in there looking at everything that comes through. 

 30:42: Yeah, because I want to see it. 

 30:45: Yes, definitely. 

 30:46: It’s almost like this is work time is reading the promotion tabs. 

 30:50: Yes, yeah, yeah. 

 30:51: And also like when my daughter’s up at 2 a.m. in the morning screaming, I’ll just flick through promotions tab to see what’s going on, yeah. 

 30:59: What’s gonna happen when you start sleeping through the night? 

 31:01: Yeah, work’s gonna go downhill what’s gonna happen. 

 31:05: Your creativity is just gonna go down. 

 31:07: They actually say creativity spikes in the middle of the night, so there you go, yeah, I’ll make sure she keeps waking me up. 

 31:13: It’s fine. 

 31:15: All right, thank you for all your insights. 

 31:17: This was really fascinating and I can’t wait for everyone to listen. 

 31:21: Thanks for joining me for email story time. 

 31:23: If you enjoyed today’s story, give this podcast a review so email marketers like you can have more fun with email. 

 31:29: See you next week when we dig into this story’s takeaways.