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Motorpoint is the UK’s leading independent retailer of nearly new and used cars. Founded in 1998, the business has 20 stores across the UK and offers customers a multichannel car-buying experience.
Over the last 18 months, the business has worked to bring more of its PR functionality in-house and reduce reliance on third parties when looking to secure coverage and links.
With a PR strategy designed to support wider communication and SEO objectives, it was important for Motorpoint to find a way to scale up outreach while ensuring that PR efforts remained as impactful as possible.
Below, Lizzie Parr, PR Manager at Motorpoint, shares how BuzzStream has helped simplify the team’s outreach process and why utilising the post-outreach data available within the platform is essential for driving results.
Maximising Email Opens With BuzzStream
Cutting through the noise and getting your content seen by journalists has always been difficult, but with research suggesting that PRs now outnumber journalists in the UK, it’s more challenging than ever.
In such a competitive environment, understanding how journalists use their inboxes is essential to give your content the greatest chance of being read (and hopefully used).
With the option to track email opens, BuzzStream offers us the chance to understand how and when journalists are engaging with our outreach, from first send and follow-ups through to coverage landing – and sometimes even after that.
Having this level of insight has proven essential for us when it comes to making more informed strategic decisions. Being able to analyse how our outreach is performing at every stage of the process, is essential to avoid wasting our efforts.
There are a few ways we use Buzzstream to help maximise email opens, but the most notable is for A/B testing subject lines.
A/B Testing Subject Lines
By testing different options to see what has the highest open rate, we can tweak our outreach accordingly and use what we have learned to inform subsequent follow-ups.
Below is an example of how we used Buzzstream to compare subject line performance:
Beyond A/B testing and email personalisation, the platform’s email open function allows us to test the best time of day to send out our content.
By closely monitoring open rates across a range of projects, we’re able to build a clearer understanding of how different publications and journalists use their inboxes.
Then, within Buzzstream’s outreach platform, personalising email content is easy.
You can quickly tweak subject lines to best match the format used by the publication or journalist you are targeting.
This level of data is relatively unheard of if outreaching direct from your inbox and has proven essential when it comes to getting our emails read.
Tracking Engagement and Strategic Follow-Ups
Within Buzzstream, we can see if a journalist has opened our content, along with when and how often they revisited the piece.
This information is useful when re-engaging with journalists.
Within the platform, you can filter your outreach list by email opens, meaning it’s easy to prioritise who you follow up with and how to frame your email based on how warm the lead is.
Below, you can see how we are able to track when a journalist has re-engaged with a piece of content:
If contacts in your outreach list are yet to engage with your content, you can forgo a follow-up and instead re-pitch the story to them with a different subject line or focus – giving you another chance to get your content seen.
With this approach, Motorpoint has found that journalists who have not previously engaged with the content are more likely to open a freshly pitched story, as opposed to a follow-up for an email they have not previously opened.
Simplifying the Outreach Process
Beyond giving us access to a wealth of data that we otherwise wouldn’t have, Buzzstream has streamlined our outreach process and halved the amount of time we spend collating media lists and pitching directly from our inbox.
There are a range of features within the platform that make it incredibly efficient to build out media lists and pitch, but some of our favourites are:
- Website and person tags – offers the ability to categorise contacts based on their interests and the types of stories they cover regularly
- Ability to copy contacts between projects – saves huge amounts of time when it comes to building out outreach lists for similar projects
- Full contact list stored within the platform – means we don’t have to manually re-add details as everything is stored centrally and will pull through people already in our contacts as suggestions
The ability to see all earlier interactions with a journalist makes it easy to see what pitching strategies have worked historically.
The platform’s ability to personalise pitch emails even when sending to a list of contacts means you don’t waste time flicking between screens when outreaching.
Having all our templates and outreach list stored in BuzzStream means we can quickly rework a piece of content if it aligns with something in the news agenda – helping us make our evergreen content work harder (without requiring a huge investment of time).
What Impact Has Buzzstream Had on Motorpoint’s PR Activity?
Motorpoint started using BuzzStream in January 2023. Since then, we’ve secured over 400 pieces of coverage, 90% of which include a link back to the Motorpoint website.
The team has been able to grow results without adding additional headcount, and this is due largely to efficiencies achieved with tools such as BuzzStream.
Here are two real examples of campaigns that BuzzStream helped our campaigns.
Example 1: Winter Driving Mailer
As part of our proactive press office strategy, we look to re-issue our winter driving piece whenever snow is predicted.
While weather-related content tends to perform well, time is of the essence when sharing it with the media.
With our pitches and media lists already saved as a project in BuzzStream, it’s quick for us to refresh the piece and share it with the media.
Here’s a quick view of our outreach:
We never spend more than a couple of hours re-outreaching this piece and have pushed it out three times over the last 18 months, securing over 35 pieces of coverage.
Example 2: Fuel-Efficient Driving Campaign
Another example of a campaign where outreach through BuzzStream helped bolster results is our fuel-efficient driving campaign.
With fuel prices well covered in the media, our advice-focused campaign used original data to predict exactly how much motorists could expect to spend on fuel in 2023 and share tips and tricks to help car owners go further between filling up.
In addition to providing clear and realistic advice for drivers, this campaign also highlighted some of the most fuel-efficient vehicles on the market – giving them the Motorpoint stamp of approval.
Here is a snapshot of the pitch:
So far, the campaign has secured 151 pieces of coverage across titles including the Mail Online, This is Money, Express, Daily Record, Wales Online and the Lancashire Telegraph.
As a result of our outreach, we were able to secure over 140 new links on a huge number of highly authoritative websites.
Final Thoughts
Discussing Motorpoint’s experience with BuzzStream, Lizzie said: “When I first joined Motorpoint, I really championed us subscribing to BuzzStream as I’d has nothing but positive experiences with the platform in previous roles.
“Since we began using the tool in early 2023, it’s allowed us to bring all our outreach in-house and expand our knowledge about the media – helping reduce our reliance on third parties and allowing us to continually secure incredible coverage.”
Lizzie Parr
Lizzie leads on all PR and outreach activity at Motorpoint. Prior to making the move to automotive, she built and executed impactful digital PR strategies for brands including musicMagpie, M&S and Merlin.Disclaimer: The author's views are entirely their own, and don't necessarily reflect the opinions of BuzzStream.
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