The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) is the UK’s leading gardening charity. Member retention is crucial for the RHS to keep their gardens, shows, festivals and events alive.

Member renewals are the lowest for members in their first 2 years of membership. Our objective was to target those members with an innovative direct mail campaign to encourage members to make use of their member benefits, especially garden visits, as there is a strong correlation between garden visits and membership renewal. This campaign took place during the seasonal changes of Autumn 2019.

We used five of the RHS’s key gardens and rich customer data to deliver a highly personalised piece of mail, tailored for each individual member. We wanted to encourage these members to visit Glow - the RHS’s botanical-inspired light installations from December to the end of January 2020. By increasing garden visits, we aimed to also increase member renewals in this critical period of their membership.

The key garden locations:

o Harlow Carr Garden -Yorkshire
o Hyde Hall Garden – Essex
o Rosemoor Garden – Devon
o Wisley Garden – Surrey
o A generic garden if not enough data was present.

We utilised print on demand to build a booklet driven by the profile of the member. If a member had a history of attending a certain garden, then the range of images to that person were tailored to suit.

This was coupled with data from the RHS differentiating between those paying by direct debit and cash payers. On the back page of the booklet, incentive vouchers were offered so that a redemption discount could be taken with the garden and the gift shop. This data could then be fed back to RHS’s marketing team to confirm which members had used the voucher to spend in store, enabling them to directly measure engagement.