World Cup 2018: how it has impacted email programme performance

As England’s unexpected march to the World Cup semi-finals gathered momentum, a sub-plot was the ‘re-connection’ of fans with their team. An increased perception of a team lacking stars, but full of lion-hearted performers who play for each other, and a grounded, humble manager who comes across as a really nice guy, resonated with the English public.

This may have been reflected in the official national happiness index, which the Office of National Statistics (ONS) produces on a quarterly basis. As far back as December 2017, overall UK happiness was already inching upwards. More recently, it was revealed that England is at a happiness high water mark – possibly a combined result of a Royal wedding, great weather and World Cup achievements.

Impacting the FA email programme performance

Aligned with this groundswell of national support, we have also seen a big performance uplift from the Football Association’s (FA) email programme, posing the question, are these two factors connected? I’ve classified the FA’s email activity by ‘Qualifying’ (January to early October 2017), ‘Pre-World Cup’ (up to mid-June 2018), and the ‘World Cup’ itself. Metrics are benchmarked against the Qualifying period (index=100):

During the Pre-World Cup phase, as England supporters began to appreciate what Gareth Southgate was achieving with his young squad, email engagement also started to increase. Average read rates went up by 10 per cent, and spam filtering rates reduced by almost two-fifths.

During the World Cup tournament, England’s performance further encouraged fans to dare to believe that football might finally be coming home. Read rates rose to a stratospheric 41 per cent above the 2017 benchmark, while spam filtering rates were less than a third of previous levels. Complaint rates were – to all intents and purposes – zero, further reflecting England supporters’ positive mood.

Analysing the football/email relationship

This isn’t completely new. A few years ago, I looked at the relationship between email and premier league football. There is a clear link between shared subscribers and footballing success. Measured by email list overlap, less than 5 per cent of Manchester United members (13 premiership titles at the time) were also members of the other ‘Big 6’ clubs. Contrast this with Tottenham Hotspur (0 premiership titles at the time – or now, for that matter!), where more than 20 per cent of their fair-weather fans also followed another team.

More recently, I considered the impact of wins and losses on email programme performance. I pulled campaign data for the Big-6 clubs for the full 2017/18 season and overlaid all the corresponding match results:

• Overall Read rates are 5 per cent lower following a loss, while spam filtering rates increase by almost one-fifth, indicating higher levels of negative engagement.
• But there are distinct variances depending on level of opponent. Losses to European teams see average read rates plummet by one-sixth and spam filtering rates increase by almost three times.
• However, losses to teams that are not European or Big-6 (and are perhaps more unexpected) see a 15 per cent increase in read rates, while spam filtering rates decrease by a quarter! It feels like there is a collective sense of, “What happened? I need to read this email to help me understand.”

Email is also not the only channel where sporting success informs sentiment. Aylien analysed 27 million tweets from the Euro 2016 football championships. Polarity (a measure of positive vs negative sentiment) for England was lukewarm at the start of the tournament and became definitively negative following the infamous loss to Iceland. In the final, pre-match polarity for France (the favourites) was highly positive, but crashed following the Portuguese goal that ultimately won the match.

The power of external factors

But is it correct to make a connection between the improved public mood and the performance of the FA’s email programme? The answer is “almost certainly”. Last year’s DMA Consumer Email Tracker report stated around one in five consumers said they would mark an email as spam or junk if they did not like the brand, had lost trust in the brand or had a negative customer experience with the brand. It stands to reason that the opposite also holds true – when a sender’s brand reputation is positive, engagement with their emails will be more positive, too.

Research has shown that external factors can have a significant impact on email marketing programme. Take the weather, for example. There is often an interesting correlation between the weather and spam rates. When there are periods of warm weather, user-marked spam rates increase, while with cold weather, it has the opposite effect.

You only need to think of the Oxfam controversy earlier this year to understand the importance of public sentiment. Before the story hit the headlines in January, the charity’s email marketing programme’s average spam complaint rate was close to zero per cent. However, following the bad press, this rose to 1.8 per cent in February – 10 times higher than the average complaint rate.

While these insights are interesting, do they have practical applications? The answer is, almost certainly. The relationship between external factors and email performance is clear and public sentiment is no different. With that in mind, could the recent spate of high-profile business failures in the UK indicate whether a negative shift in email sentiment provides an early indicator of subsequent business failure?

While it was a sad day for England football fans on Wednesday as we bowed out of the tournament, what we can take away from the last few weeks is that we have become a highly engaged nation as a result of our achievement – and this couldn’t be more evident than when looking at the FA’s email programme performance.

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