Launched in June 2005, Lovereading.co.uk  specialises in helping readers find books they enjoy.

Uniquely, the site enables readers to download 10-15 page samples of featured books, so that they can replicate the experience of thumbing through them in a bookshop. As well as making money from book sales, Lovereading offers a service to publishers in introducing their books to people who will like them.

“It’s a simple idea, but nobody had put it in place before,” says Peter Crawshaw, director and co-founder of Lovereading Ltd. “Our books are chosen by an editorial panel headed up by a lady with 25 years’ experience in the book trade. To date over 105,000 people have signed up for our unique mix of guided choices and chapter downloads.”

Delivering targeted content
As well as declaring their reading preferences, registered users can specify how often they want to hear from Lovereading .co.uk – monthly, twice a month or weekly. Lovereading needed an email solution that could interpret the preferred frequency and genre choices and dynamically create an email containing targeted content.

“Each reader gets an email that only includes books they will like and is only emailed as often as they like. It sounds so straightforward,” says Crawshaw. “In reality, it was hard to do. Each person has different variables: different genres and different frequencies.

We started with a very large opt-in email provider who said they could do what we wanted, but they couldn’t. It was incredibly frustrating. After three months we had to look for another supplier. We tested two other providers apart from Email Reaction – both quite well known brands. Everyone said they could do it, but Email Reaction was the only one that worked with sample data. Running tests was the real ‘wheat from the chaff’ moment. When Email Reaction proved they could do it, we were confident to sign the contract.”

Personalised messages for each recipient
Lovereading creates email segments promoting new books dedicated to each genre. Email Reaction’s software combines these segments to create a message personalised to the interests of each recipient. Email Reaction’s tools can be used to re-order the content for each email, so that it reflects the recipient’s preferences with the most interesting content coming first. “We’ve even put a limit on the number of genres that can be sent,” says Crawshaw. “We didn’t want people receiving a massive email if they selected 16 genres. If they’ve chosen too many, we decide which are the most important for us to tell them about.”

Each message begins with a personalised greeting. “If we have their first name, we use that,” says Crawshaw. “A nice feature of Email Reaction is that it enables us to greet by first name, if we’ve got it, or by title plus surname if not, or if we don’t have a surname with simply ‘dear reader’.” The selection and insertion of the greeting is fully automated.

Effective yet simple interface
The Email Reaction interface is built on the ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) principle, so there’s no need for Lovereading to use HTML to code their messages. “We can control Email Reaction without any need for web development,” says Crawshaw. “It’s very easy to use and not at all technical once it’s been set up. I like the fact that once you have the basic text, you can add images and links easily.

We’ve got different icons based on the Lovereading heart, which we can use to make it look visually interesting without having to do any HTML coding. We had one with holly bits popping out at Christmas, for example, and we could easily import it into our emails. Being able to see what you’re doing as you go along is helpful. We can send test emails from Email Reaction to see the final result as well. It’s very effective.”

Report tools to help understand your customers better
Email Reaction provides easy-to-interpret reports that show how many emails bounced, were opened, were clicked on and resulted in a sale. It can also track the value of the sale, so that the return on investment for each email campaign can be calculated.

“The best thing about working with Email Reaction is being able to understand what our customers are doing,” says Crawshaw. “Before working with Email Reaction, we couldn’t get a consistent view on opens, clicks and how we were doing. It’s such an important part of our business that we had to understand how people are responding to our emails. The reporting in Email Reaction is easy to use. I’m pretty data literate, but Email Reaction makes it approachable even for the dataphobic. We’re still exploring the full potential of the tracking, but the tracking tools are important as we experiment with different subject lines, times of day and promotions.”

Friendly support service
Email Reaction offers full training and support for its software. “They always deliver,” says Crawshaw. “The helpdesk is happy to talk you through queries, from the most menial to the most serious. You never hear them complaining that we’re on the phone again! They’re all friendly and easy to deal with.”

The team at Email Reaction is also flexible in responding to Lovereading ’s needs. “They're willing to change and develop things if it’s beneficial to us both”, says Crawshaw. I know that some of the things that they have worked up for us, they will incorporate into the core product so everyone can benefit.

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