Parcelforce Worldwide Success Story

The Company

Parcelforce Worldwide is the parcel distribution and delivery business of the Royal Mail Group plc and is the UK's largest parcel carrier. It provides access to the world's largest delivery network, covering more than 99.6 per cent of the global population and reaching 239 different countries and territories. It offers UK and international express parcel delivery, air courier services, next day and overnight express parcel and document delivery/collection, as well as freight delivery and express package shipping. 95% of the UK's top 100 companies rely on Parcelforce Worldwide for their distribution needs. The Royal Mail Group is a public limited company wholly owned by the UK Government, with annual sales in excess of £8 billion and more than 220,000 employees.

The Challenge

In April 2000 Optimize was invited to join with Communications Services within the Royal Mail to bid for the work to develop a new web site for Parcelforce Worldwide. Optimize's remit was to work alongside the marketing team, copywriters and web design team to develop a web site that would ensure opportunities to attract more targeted visitors to the web site would be maximised.

The contract was awarded to Communication Services and Optimize in June 2000. The new web site was launched towards the end of November 2000 and implementation of the full search engine marketing campaign began in late December 2000.

The Successes

Over the following 18 months Optimize worked in partnership with Parcelforce Worldwide to grow the total number of visitors to the site from 108,793 in January 2001 to 324,213 in January 2002, a rise of 198%. No other significant marketing campaigns were undertaken during that period - either online or offline (in contrast to its sister businesses, Royal Mail and Post Office Counters which both ran numerous direct mail, press and TV advertising campaigns - particularly in the lead up to Christmas 2001).

From January 2001 until August 2001* visitors that first came to the Parcelforce Worldwide site through the search engines and directories grew by an average of just over 600% per annum (when measured in one month compared to the same month in the preceding year) - reaching an annual growth of 1,400% in August 2001. Over the whole time the proportion of search engine visitors grew steadily month-by-month reaching 7.64% of total visitors (as opposed to new visitors - where the proportion was a lot higher) by August 2001.

*Note: in August 2001 Parcelforce changed its web log analysis software and from that day forward comparable figures for visitors coming through the search engines were unavailable.

Alan Wright - E-Commerce Manager, Business Development, Parcelforce Worldwide:
Optimize's contribution to the Parcelforce.com success story was the capability to quantify it for us in a way which was easily understood, and at a cost which was affordable. Optimize's brief was to stimulate visitors to the new site which had been developed internally by Post Office Communication Services and Business Systems and launched in October 2000.

Parcelforce had recently rebranded itself with the addition of the word "Worldwide", in an effort to reposition itself as a truly global organisation. I was particularly interested in generating visitors from overseas (receiving and sending destinations). Optimize responded to this challenge with enthusiasm and pragmatism, despite a rather indifferent attitude at the time to all things dot com by those outside the immediate "team". The statistics are further testimony to their contribution.

Total visitor growth over period of campaign: