The Sale of 69 - carwow integrated marketing campaign

Overview

In September 2019, the UK Driver & Vehicle Licence Agency released new licence plates, including the number 69, which would apply to all cars registered in the second half of the year. The 69 licence plates provided a unique marketing opportunity for car dealerships and manufacturers. As a result, Carwow decided to create a sales campaign, focusing on the new licence plates as a creative opportunity.

Sale period

2nd - 16th September 2019.

The team

Product Marketing Designer (Me).
Head of Marketing.
Commercial Project Manager.
Commercial team.
Development team.
Data Analytics team.
Email Marketing team.
SEO Team.
PR Marketeer.
Social Media Marketeer.

My role: Lead Marketing Designer

I led the design and art direction for the sale campaign. In addition, I was responsible for producing new campaign creative to set the look & feel across all marketing channels, including the website, email templates, editorial content and social media. This involved cross-functional collaboration between all teams and working closely with the head of marketing.

Campaign Goals

(X is used instead of actual numbers due to confidentiality).
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‍• Deliver X number of incremental sales for new cars during the sale period.
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• Generate X number of new enquirers during the sale period.
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• Increase dealership participation from previous sales by X%.

Design Goals

• Standout visuals that capture customer's attention across all channels.
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• Design consistency across product, marketing, editorial and social media graphics.
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• Flexible design style to enable marketing automation.

Ideas and visual inspiration

Moodboards, graphic styles and typography.

Inspiration image graphics and typography

'The Sale of 69'

Campaign messaging

The marketing team produced a messaging framework to support all sale assets and activities across multiple channels such as; product landing pages, emails, social and editorial content.
Using this framework, the team created headlines and messaging for the campaign. The messaging leaned heavily into a play on words with the 'Summer of 69' Bryan Adams lyrics, combined with an urgent call to action. Examples included:

'The Sale of 69.'
'These deals won't last forever'.
'The best sale of our life'.
'The plates are changin.'
'Hurry, it's now or never - deals end in [countdown date]'

The marketing team deliberately avoided obvious x-rated puns and references synonyms with the number 69. The campaign messaging dared to be different and take a fresher, friendly approach to engage its customers. This created differentiation and stand-out from competitors and the automotive industry press.

Sale landing page design

I selected a bright colour theme of purple, white, and orange to create a visual standout. This colour scheme was in direct contrast to the brand's already established blues and greys. I made a typographic 69 illustration that referenced retro typographic styles reminiscent of the 1960's and early 70's automotive event designs.

Countdown clock to create urgency and highlight the sale period

Email marketing automation

Below are examples of email templates I created to deliver on the design goal of providing self-serve marketing graphics that would be flexible across formats. The email team used these as base assets within their mailouts, including headlines, subheadings and car images for specific target audience groups.

Social graphics

Paid Social Ads for Facebook & Instagram

Example assets for Facebook Carousel, Instagram and Stories placements. These templates were created in Photoshop using Smart Objects, allowing the social media marketing team to quickly replace the car images and build new carousel graphics on the go.

Coverphotos and post templates for Facebook and Instagram

Carwow's Facebook and Youtube pages have over 3 million subscribers. So I created templates for the in-house editorial and video production team to use when producing content for these owned media channels to help leverage existing subscribers from Social to the campaign landing page.

The Design Process

Double Diamond approach

I used a design process that followed a 'double diamond' approach. I chose this method to ensure transparency into my working methods, provide timelines and estimations on design deliverables, and keep all stakeholders informed. In addition, I included checkpoints, design critiques and feedback sessions into the process, which enabled the creative process to stay on schedule and budget.

The result

Campaign Success!

The campaign launched on time and immediately generated increased enquiries and positive engagement with customers. Key results are outlined below:

• Delivered an increase of incremental sales as projected.
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• X% Website traffic increase during the sale period.
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• Industry PR coverage: Daily Express, AM-Online, and The Daily Star - to name a few.
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• 130 email campaigns were sent out with automated graphics, delivering over 11k combined enquirers during the period.
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• Social media paid channels experienced an uplift in CTR on the campaign creative Vs a non-sale period.