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Applying ROAD to the Toptable CRM programme

Relevance

Prior to working with Emailcenter Toptable emails contained minimal personalisation. Each recipient received 

the same restaurant offers and reviews no matter where they lived or worked in the UK.

Using existing RSS feeds from the Toptable site Emailcenter automated the production of content con‑

taining offers, reviews and news items for each of their 300 locations. All Toptable have to do now for each 

email is change global elements such as subject lines, intro messages and advertising.

Not only did this see increases in performance (tailored emails have generated conversion rates over 

twice that of the generic versions), it enabled Toptable to offer a highly relevant email to all of their customers 

no matter where they are based in the UK.

Increasing the relevance of the content always improves the performance of an email programme. 

However, an additional tactic is to be relevant with the timing of the email.

An effective tactic was put in place that sent targeted triggered messages that replaced the newsletter to 

a number of segments including:

● 

Defectors – customers that made their last booking 6 weeks ago

● 

Lookers – customers that registered a month ago but have yet to make a booking.

Each segment had a series of emails that were delivered a week apart, each with ever improving offers. If a 

customer makes a booking from one of these emails they do not get any further emails in future weeks and 

resume receipt of the newsletter.

These emails were over 17 times more effective at reactivating customers and changing their booking 

behaviour than the newsletter. These triggered emails also helped increase the number of paid bookings 

from email activity by 26% per week, despite being less than 5% of the emails sent each week.

Figure 9.15

Toptable

Source: www.toptable.co.uk, accessed January 2011.

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