Great Western Railway: From Doormat to Legendary Destinations
4 min
What our client needed
Great Western Railway wanted to inspire more leisure travel across its network, attracting new passengers, encouraging existing customers to travel more and building longer-term relationships through GWR Rewards.
GWR’s new multi-channel myths and legends campaign had already created strong awareness, with their Line to Legend Land map serving as a key campaign asset. GWR wanted to build on this awareness and turn destination inspiration into measurable action. The challenge was to reach the right audiences, capture attention in the home and create a simple journey from physical mail into digital exploration, ticket booking and loyalty registration.
What we gave them
Paragon created a targeted, connected door drop campaign designed to take customers from doormat to destination.
Using ACORN audience profiling, we identified digitally engaged, rail-connected London households with a propensity for leisure travel. An illustrated A5 map was then delivered to 100,961 households, bringing seven myths and legends from across the GWR network directly into customers’ homes.
The printed piece was designed to work as an engaging destination guide in its own right, while a QR code provided a seamless route into an immersive, browser-based WebAR experience. Developed with WebAR specialists Far From Square, the experience brought the seven legendary locations to life through animation, sound and interaction, with no app download required.
From there, customers could discover more about the destinations before continuing to ticket booking or GWR Rewards registration. Strategy, targeting, creative, distribution and measurement were brought together as one connected physical-to-digital customer journey.
What was the impact
The campaign reached 100,961 households and achieved a 1.57% response rate – 6.5 times the JICMAIL UK Door Drop benchmark of 0.24%.
It generated 1,589 individual responders, including 438 newly acquired passenger responses, who were associated with 3,368 bookings during the evaluation period.
The campaign also generated 323 GWR Rewards registrations, including 294 from newly acquired passengers. The physical-to-digital journey delivered 722 QR scans, with an average of 1 minute 16 seconds of tracked active engagement. 21.1% returned to the experience and 116 onward CTA clicks were recorded.
The results demonstrated how targeted door drops can complement a digital-first marketing strategy, connecting physical attention with digital engagement and creating measurable action across passenger acquisition, booking and loyalty.