Customer name: Abcam
Industry: Life Sciences / B2B e-commerce
Business Need: Create effective B2B marketing communications in ten languages. Engage with a rapidly growing number of bio-tech scientists worldwide, while promoting a catalogue of 67,000+ products
Objectives:
• Increase campaign deliverability, relevancy, reactivity and sales
• Reduce complexity, timescales and cost
• Improve adherence to preferred techniques and procedures
Results:
• Reduced new campaign creation time by some 35 percent, saving 48 staff days/year
• Achieved email opening rates of 18.4 percent and click-throughs of circa 3.6 percent
• Email deliverability rates now typically exceed 96 percent
Abcam implements Neolane to win healthy B2B marketing results
Abcam, owner of one of the world’s largest catalogues of antibodies, engages Neolane’s conversational marketing technology to conduct high response, one-to-one personalised B2B campaigns
Who is the client company, what products / service do they offer?
Abcam is a producer and distributor of research-grade antibodies with offices located in the UK, US, Japan and Hong Kong. The company produces and distributes its own and third party produced antibodies to academic and commercial users in over 70 countries. With an online catalogue of over 67,000 products, Abcam covers hundreds of disciplines including cancer, immunology and neuroscience. The company’s vision is to build the largest online antibody resource in the world while also ensuring that the antibodies are of high quality and commercially viable. Some 600-800 new products are added to the catalogue every month.
What was the challenge?
“Each of our customers is a specialist and our challenge is to generate timely content that’s specific to their field of activity,” said Jim Warwick, chief operating officer at Abcam. “Only by seeing the subject matter as directly relevant to them, will an individual open it, read it and perhaps click-through to the Abcam website.”
Abcam’s main channel of outbound customer communication is email. Customers can opt-in via the website to receive newsletters on their area of research, product updates, and other marketing content such as regional news, promotions and invitations to Abcam scientific conferences.
What was the problem?
In its early days, the company developed a proprietary email marketing application which allowed marketers to semi-automate rudimentary segmented campaigns. Requiring SQL database query skills for any advanced segmentation and the ability to write HTML code, IT support was often required. As the company grew its product range, customer base and the number of campaigns it needed to run, it began to reach the limits of its in-house tool.
Reporting was limited too. Although click throughs were measurable, open rates and deliverability could at best only be roughly estimated, making it hard to direct improvements.
Additionally, the email application couldn’t support the marketing best practices Abcam wanted to introduce, such as highly refined content personalisation, campaign testing and event-triggered emails.
How did they find the solution provider?
“We needed a smarter, more user-friendly and scalable solution to meet our requirement for delivering personalised content to our rapidly expanding customer base,” said Warwick. “We evaluated a number of tools, but were at first disappointed by their inflexibility and lack of sophistication. Then we discovered Neolane.”
“Neolane was the only platform to meet our needs on functionality and scalability and it offers impressive one-to-one personalisation capabilities rather than just simple segmentation,” said Warwick. “Neolane is highly configurable and while very sophisticated, it’s user friendly for marketers.”
For Abcam, there was also its data management policy to consider. The company maintains a central database offering a high quality and very detailed single customer view serving multiple enterprise applications. Abcam wanted its marketing automation solution to draw upon that existing data source for advanced segmentation of its customer base.
“We found that most marketing automation tools mandate use of their own proprietary datamart, which would have meant undertaking a complex integration exercise,” said Warwick. “Neolane offered us the freedom to couple directly with our existing customer database, saving considerable expense and the potential risks of data integration.”
How did they act?
Implementation was phased over twelve months starting with the UK and progressing across the company’s worldwide operations. Abcam engaged Neolane Professional Services to help optimise more complex processes such as automated one-to-one content personalised product updates. Abcam also committed to develop a senior eCommerce employee skilled in campaign process design towards becoming a ‘Neolane super-user’ entrusted with building workflows and supporting the team.
What are the benifits?
Captured as workflow elements, Abcam’s marketers can now simply build a performance optimised, one-to-one campaign by selecting the relevant workflow items. No input from IT is required.
“We now have a central point of control over campaigns,” said Warwick. “Neolane enables us to define, capture and enforce best-practice process workflows including for proper proofing and authorisations.”
The Abcam’s campaigns run on Neolane
- Automated one-to-one personalised product updates to enable customers to keep up with products that are relevant to their research
- Research field updates: 20-25 different newsletters per month, with personalised, relevant news and offers
- Monthly regional updates
- Specific promotions targeted to key accounts
- Event-triggered messages: e.g. new customer welcomes and purchase follow-ups
- Event invites: Abcam seminar and conference alerts to the specific customers that would find them relevant
At Abcam, high-level personalisation variables include the individual’s discipline, specific area of expertise, and their geography. Abcam’s international offices and audiences are supported by ten language options and reflect cultural preferences. Much finer personalisation is achieved through analysis of each customer’s click-throughs and purchases.
Considered essential by Abcam, campaign reporting is another Neolane strength. “The accessibility and ease-of-use of campaign reports has enabled us to analyse overall campaign performance and trends guiding continual improvement,” said Warwick. “We’ve also used it to test the effect on deliverability and reactivity of using different variables for the same email.”
What results were achieved?
Abcam is enjoying many benefits from its Neolane investment:
- Email deliverability rates typically exceed 96 percent. Abcam’s deliverability rates with several very large organisations employing thousands of customer contacts are up by 400 percent though using a technique known as ‘throttling’ to control the number of emails sent hourly to any one domain name.
- Improved targeting and one-to-one personalisation of subject titles and content and better formatting is also stimulating campaign opening rates of 18.4 percent#. Click through rates now average 3.6 percent.
- The manual input to prepare one-off campaigns such as the regional, product and research field updates has fallen by some 35 percent. While it took perhaps 3 hours to create a campaign before, it takes around 2 hours now; saving 48 staff days per year.
What’s next?
In the near future Abcam will improve marketing return on investment further. For example, finer personalisation and ‘next-best-offer’ features will be enabled by utilising further degrees of intelligence gleaned from very recent interactions. More event-triggered campaigns will be run too, linked to interaction behaviour.
“We are confident that with Neolane we can continue to improve the quality of our customer marketing campaigns, supporting our continued growth”, concluded Warwick.