Best use of data in a B2B marketing campaign
Winner: Invitrogen
Agency: eMarket2
Campaign: iProfile
Invitrogen supplies products to every major laboratory worldwide. It has a $1.3 billion turnover, over 4800 employees, a portfolio of over 25,000 products and operates in more than 50 countries. It needed to be able to communicate on a personalised one-to-one basis with the 400,000 scientists worldwide who are hidden within life science organisations and protected from normal sales and marketing communications. The main aim of the campaign was to make such communication possible and successful.
The objectives of the campaign, its metrics and budget were all available to the judges of the B2B Marketing Awards and the campaign was assessed accordingly. Client confidentiality, however, restricts publication in their entirety.
The main campaign goals were:
– To understand more about what science Invitrogen’s customers and prospects are using in order to provide them with relevant and accurate scientific support
– To find new contacts through personal recommendation
– To develop a one-to-one opt-in relationship
– To have collected an iProfile for 75 per cent of contacts on the cleansed database by the end of 2006
– To increase the number of emails which are opened, read and pursued
– To generate 350 primary leads for sales teams
– To increase the purchase of products online.
The campaign needed to be flexible enough to adapt to local cultural and data privacy issues, particularly in the EMEA region. Invitrogen aimed to use campaign findings to build stronger relationships with its customers and help position them as market leaders. Facts learned from the campaign influenced the R&D investment areas and significantly increased online lead generation and purchasing.
Scientists and researchers are highly intelligent experts often working under great pressure and with specialist requirements. Agency eMarket2 proposed a communications strategy which would fundamentally change the marketing relationship between the company and its customers and prospects, from one of interruption marketing to one of permission marketing. The iProfile campaign used opt-in vehicles to generate leads and invited research customers to specify what interested them.
The campaign encouraged customers and prospects to:
– Specify their areas of research interest
– Confirm their preferred method of communication (e.g. email, phone web)
– Provide the names of colleagues
– State whether they need immediate help (lead generation).
In return Invitrogen promised only to provide information you want, the way you want’ in future communications. The aim was to establish a long-term, two-way dialogue which rewards academic and scientific customers for paying attention to increasingly relevant messages.
The EMEA iProfile programme involved the processing of over 150,000 contact records on the company’s database. Core information was collected from email, surface mail, telemarketing, web, sales reps and exhibitions to provide targeted, responsive and cost-effective communications.
A systematic email marketing programme encouraged the company’s customers and prospects to complete a profile of themselves online to provide information about their needs and interest areas. Different incentives were offered to new opt-ins to persuade them to complete personal iProfiles on their interests. In addition a lead generation question was asked on the profile form. Respondents could answer either yes or no and choose from a list of the 25 key product areas. To maximise responses, three successive emails were sent; each mailing was only dispatched to those who did not respond to earlier emails.
The second phase of the campaign was reinforced with telemarketing in five languages to help identify additional qualified contacts and email addresses within the target market. In addition, sales and technical support staff were offered incentives to collect iProfile information. Finally, an exhibition web kiosk was developed to collect data at events across EMEA.
The response was astounding. A dynamic database has been constructed of contacts who have opted in to receive information. Data on 104,000 contacts (67 per cent) has been cleaned and enhanced while 6262 new decision-making contacts referred by their colleagues have been added to the database. Information about 60 per cent of the contacts has been enhanced automatically and 26,000 new email addresses have been automatically added. A total of 29 per cent of contacts updated their iProfile themselves.
Using iProfile increased the number of emails opened by 15 per cent while the number of recipients moving onto the website increased from three per cent to five per cent. Online purchasing substantially increased as subsequent emails were better targeted. The programme generated 3571 sales leads of which 2427 were classified as primary leads. The response was particularly impressive given that the marketing activity was not actively pushing any product offers or promotions.
Invitrogen is now rolling out the same iProfile programme in the US and Canada in order to offer customers worldwide the opportunity to specify precisely what life science information they want to receive.
Through iProfile Invitrogen can easily segment lists sending those who have opted in only highly relevant information. Invitrogen now has a platform for building a regular and highly personalised dialogue with contacts which directly relates to their individual areas of research interest.
