Case Study: Central Bedfordshire

Central Bedfordshire, with its population of nearly 300,000 residents is largely rural with over half its population living in the countryside. The team at this unitary authority faced a number of challenges keeping their residents informed with timely and relevant information, and improving engagement was high on the agenda when the team moved to e-shot for their email newsletters and strategic campaigns.

Over the years the options for newsletter topics had become unmanageable, with many options available to residents to choose from, but often with minimal output or support for that topic. A key strategic priority was to consolidate topics in line with the needs and priorities of the audience, whilst supporting services get their messages to the widest readership.

"The ability to segment our audiences and tailor messages more precisely has been a real step forward. It’s helped improve both engagement and confidence in our digital communications."

Central Bedfordshire Council’s communications team also faced a daunting challenge from their waste and recycling service: encourage nearly 50,000 residents to renew and pay for their garden waste recycling subscriptions – within a matter of weeks and on a minimal budget.

The service had no existing infrastructure to directly communicate with residents, so the communications team was tasked with rapidly building awareness, prompting action and collecting payments at scale - a task that would reasonably require months of preparation and a sizeable marketing spend.

e-shot played a key role in the consolidation of the comms for Central Bedfordshire. Here’s how:

Revenue generation: A three-step, behavioural led email campaign generated over £1.8m in revenue for Central Bedfordshire with their “Garden waste renewal” campaign. That is a massive £1,311 in revenue per £1 spent on the campaign which saw 73% of the target audience (32,240) renewing their garden waste subscription with the council directly as a result of this campaign.

Consolidated communications: The team's approach has shifted from multiple teams sending individual updates to a more streamlined and consolidated communications model. This has led to improved efficiency for services and more targeted, relevant information for residents. For example, rather than separate teams issuing their own alerts during a heatwave — each focused on different impacts — a single, coordinated message now brings together all key updates in one place. This ensures residents receive everything they need at once, reducing duplication and improving clarity.

Since the start of this process, we have reduced the number of separate topics from 53 to 27, allowing us to focus on the themes that matter most. A major data cleanse was also carried out to remove inactive accounts, which reduced the overall number of subscribers by around 10%, to 70,000, but has led to increased engagement, with display rates now averaging over 50%, up approximately 4% — as content is more relevant to each audience.

Data-driven insights: Using the e-shot platform, the team at Central Bedfordshire Council has been able to gather and analyse resident engagement data to better understand what content resonates most. This insight has led to more tailored and effective messaging across different audience segments.

Recent split testing has played a key role in driving these improvements. For example, changing the sender name from “Heatwave” to “Severe weather” led to a 4% higher open rate, while testing subject lines for bank holiday service updates showed a 3% difference in performance. In another test, emails without video content achieved a 6% higher open rate than those that included video. These insights are helping shape future campaigns, ensuring content is driven by evidence and resident preferences.

Audience growth and cross promotion: One of the early successes in growing the council’s newsletter audience was the garden waste campaign, which not only achieved its core objective but also encouraged residents to sign up for regular news updates. This single campaign generated an additional 2,500 subscribers, demonstrating the value of linking service communications with broader engagement goals.

Subscriber numbers have continued to grow steadily since, supported by high-profile sign-up forms triggered on the council’s highest traffic website pages. These now average around 600 new sign-ups per month, helping to build a more connected and informed audience across Central Bedfordshire.

Since partnering with e-shot, Central Bedfordshire have seen some great results including;

Increased engagement: Campaign interaction has significantly increased since the move to the e-shot platform. The consolidation of topics and improved design has paid dividends in increasing engagement with the audience.

Audience growth:  By streamlining the sign-up process, leveraging cross-promotion and tactically employing pop-up forms, Central Bedfordshire has grown its newsletter audience significantly, ensuring more residents stay informed about local updates.

High yielding tactical campaigns: The unprecedented success of the garden waste campaign has served as a valuable lesson for the team who are investigating new ways that this approach can be used to help the council meet its strategic objectives.

Improved efficiency: Streamlining processes and consolidating communications have saved time and effort for both Central Bedfordshire’s communications team, and the services teams. Allowing services to concentrate on day-to-day requirements and the comms team to focus more on content strategy and audience engagement rather than administrative tasks.

Use of behavioural based automation: The success of the garden waste campaign is a real highlight of the teams work so far and has provided many powerful lessons that they will take forward to more campaigns in a similar vein.

Central Bedfordshire’s partnership with e-shot is ongoing, with plans to continue expanding and optimising its email strategy.