In this section of the email marketing guide, we are going to take a look at a client case study. The client was fairly new to email marketing, they had tried it before with inconsistent results.
Using the Email Blaster software and with some ideas and help from the Email Blaster team, they were able to maximise their results and put tgoether camapign that has been successfull in broadening thier marketing reach.
The client makes and sells promotional branded items, these include branded office stationary, such as pens, desk organisers and flash drive storage. They are an established company with quite a large customer base of existing customers.
They have been making and selling their range of products for over 30 years, their base of clients and products available continue to grow but have showed signs of plateauing over the last few years.
The client employs a variety of marketing methods and channels. Historically they have always majored on traditional print media and exhibitions rather than digital marketing.
Trade shows have always played a major part, as their product range is very tactile, product sales have always boosted when the end user can see/feel the product. Through attending trade shows at key points during the year, new contacts have been made in decent numbers.
Follow ups to new contacts have generally taken place via a formal printed letter sent through the post. A printed letter has also been supplemented with a product pack, containing a brochure of the full range and a sample product. Sales conversions using this method have always been quite variable.
Over recent years, the client has started to use digital marketing, this has comprised of both email marketing and social media. Email marketing has been used on an intermittent basis for new contacts and for individual follow up of existing leads.
Social media has been used to publish images of successful trade shows and products. Engagement with these has typically been pretty low and they remain to be convinced that social media is a worthwhile marketing medium for a business such as theirs.
Whilst the client employs a good mix of marketing, both traditional and digital, these have not really followed a plan and tend to be quite sporadic. Marketing activity has increased during periods where the order take is lower. As soon as the order take increases, levels of marketing activity then decrease.
Digital marketing doesn’t have any coordination with print marketing and as such conversion rates can be quite low as an average. Digital campaigns don’t have a clear objective also, this has resulted in some campaigns lacking a focus or decent call to action.
The major problem facing the business is maintaining a high marketing spend, when the amount of new customers coming on board has not really increased at a sustainable rate. Whilst the conversion rate has been really good when posting out brochures and samples, it is very expensive to do this in any kind of volume.
In short, growth has slowed, marketing spend is too high and does not have any clear objectives.
The objective for Email Blaster was to come up with a plan that reduced spend, helped coordinate all activities, made sure that all marketing was planned and email marketing was measurable with clear goals It should also increase conversations when used to support other channels.
The first step was to get a good up to date database containing the email addresses of all customers and contacts. Currently the company CRM system doesn’t have email addresses for everybody and lots were invalid, owing to not being kept up to date.
Like most companies, the client has lots of contacts, generated through existing business, sales enquiries trade shows and other marketing activities. Lot’s of these don’t have email addresses recorded, so working through this list and obtaining up to date email addresses is an exercise well worth doing. Often, the healthiest conversion rates are achieved by contacting people with whom you already have a relationship.
Once the database was updated, the next step was to set up automated chains of emails. These emails would contain subscriber only offers, this helps to build loyalty as the viewer feels valued. Using automation means that email can use decision based triggers to send different emails based on user interaction.
The use of automation also means that marketing can be sent regularly at timed intervals. This tackled the problem that marketing was only done when the business was not very busy.
The use of email marketing also allowed a thorough process of qualification, before printed brochures were sent out. Email marketing analytics means that levels of user engagement can be recorded - this means that brochures and sample packs can be sent out to qualified leads. It used to be the case that all leads were sent out brochure packs, as these leads were not qualified, the financial investment was quite large.
Social media is also now used to collect subscribers to opt-in to email marketing. The client runs competitions for social media followers; who then enter their email addresses to join the mailing list and enter the competition.
Email marketing is now used to bring all of the elements of the marketing mix together. Traditional print media and social media now work to compliment email marketing and vice versa. Data mining has greatly increased the size of the subscriber list, automation of all send means that activity follows a strict timetable.
By employing all of the elements outlined, marketing spend has been decreased significantly and conversions have been increased.
By employing a more diverse range of techniques to opt in new subscribers, the rate of new business conversions has increased. This means that the plateau effect has started to show signs of stopping. Growth in new sales have now started to appear.
The new plan has been successfully implemented and healthy results have been recorded.