The Rail Delivery Group is the British rail industry’s membership body that brings together passenger and freight rail companies, along with Network Rail and HS2.
It’s responsible for developing UK rail services that deliver real improvements in how the industry operates behind the scenes and the customer experience it provides. It delivers change to existing elements of the railway by joining up the industry’s decision-making and bringing together key stakeholders with the right expertise to ensure it makes the right decisions for customers and the entire railway network. Its main areas of focus include retail and commercial functions, customer services, technology and data, and industry operations.
Quiet Storm has worked closely with the Rail Delivery Group on major projects over many years. We were recently tasked with supporting its marketing campaign to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Interrail.
A golden celebration
The Interrail Pass was created as a one-off offer in 1972 to encourage young Europeans to explore the continent by rail. Since then, more than 10m travellers have used Interrail to trek across the 33 countries, 250,000 km of track and over 40,000 destinations available to them by rail.
The Rail Delivery Group planned a massive 50% off promotion to celebrate Interrail’s golden anniversary. It was billed as a ‘once in a generation’ promotion and described by Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis as ‘one of its best-ever deals’. The six-day flash sale campaign was expected to prompt a massive increase in traffic to the Interrail website we manage on behalf of the Rail Delivery Group.
We facilitated it by scaling up our server capacity to accommodate the massive increase in demand. Once implemented, and with close monitoring, our servers were able to easily handle the increase in demand that resulted from the promotion.
Stunning results
The promotion generated more than 8,000, with sales in the region of £3.3m, including a one-day surge on the last day of the campaign, following Martin Lewis’s intervention, which prompted 4,000 orders and nearly £1.7m sales in a 24-hour period.
“We’ve worked with Quiet Storm for several years on various projects. Its team, especially Chris Marquis, went over and above to ensure this campaign went smoothly and could cope with the huge amount of traffic it generated. This work was essential as Martin Lewis included it on his Money Saving Expert website, weekly video and social posts, which prompted a huge spike in interest.”
Philip Barnard International and Integrated Transport Manager, Rail Delivery Group