Summary
Acronis did not have the luxury of a large budget or a significant amount of time to raise their profile in the very competitive world of online backup. This resulted in a campaign and programme that required several marketing goals to be completed within a short period of time.
Acronis worked with CleverTouch to create a campaign that would achieve their goals within a relatively small budget and a tight timescale.
Goals included:
1. Test and re-energise an underutilised marketing database
2. Raise the awareness of Acronis ahead of major product announcement
3. Generate leads for a new sales team
Currently the ROI is 4:1 and expected to peak at 10:1.
In addition this campaign has been used as a case study in Marketing Communications 5th Edition, PR Smith and Ze Zook, p.392
About Acronis
Acronis is a software company which helps small to medium businesses manage their backup and disaster recovery operations; they sell products both direct and through enterprise resellers. The company is a world leader in providing scalable storage management and disaster recovery software that helps enterprises safeguard their information and assures the availability, security, integrity and recoverability of their infrastructure.
Strategy – broader business issues the company is facing
CleverTouch and Acronis deployed a strategy intended to inform IT Managers from relevant organisations about the latest practices in storage backup and recovery, whilst meeting the objective to confirm that existing contacts still existed and were relevant.
The focus was on helping prospects along their buying cycle and/or journey of understanding – not purely selling to them or securing a sales appointment.
Objectives of the campaign
The objective was to target new prospects in the UK with the aim of achieving c.65 attendees per webinar for educational engagement. From these attendees, an estimated 10-20 opportunities per event would evolve with an average value of typically £5,000, i.e. £50,000-£100,000 revenue generated from each event.
The target audience
The target audience were IT managers and decision makers within organisations who had 50-500 employees in UK, Netherlands and the Nordic countries. Many smaller organisations don’t have a dedicated IT contact and therefore emails and messaging had to be designed to allow the content to be forwarded easily within an organisation to improve the chances of identifying the correct individual.
Media, channels or techniques used Acronis commissioned market research to identify the key pain points IT Managers had whilst implementing storage backup and disaster recovery solutions. The results were presented in an Acronis white paper, which became the call to action for the first email; the download for the first email was an Acronis white paper entitled “Digital Assets Research Findings: Unveiling Backup and Recovery Practices Across Europe.”
Stage one/Email one
Sent to 24,000 contacts, the initial email also had a secondary purpose of cleansing the database of contacts that were no longer in the role or relevant. This first email was then resent to all those who had not opened, whose email address was still valid (c.21,500), whilst ensuring duplicates were suppressed at all stages.
Throughout the campaign a link was included that enabled the recipient to forward to a friend, ensuring there was a visual aspect to the communications. This provided Acronis with the possibility to acquire relevant contacts for this and future campaigns.
Stage two/Email two
A further email was sent to those who had opened the first stage of the campaign with an invitation to download an Acronis Backup and Disaster Recovery Blueprint. The blueprint email was resent to those who had not opened it and whose email address was still valid (c.2,125). Simply put, this email was sent to everyone who downloaded the Digital Assets Research Findings.
Stage three/Email three
An email was sent to respondees of campaign stage one and stage two, with an invitation to attend a market research-led webinar – again highlighting the findings from the market research and linking the findings into Acronis’ best practice (c.4,600).
Stage four
A marketing engagement team was used to follow up on those contacts who:
(a) Registered and attended and
(b) Those who registered but did not attend the webinar
This was done to identify any immediate sales opportunities with the qualified sales leads passed to the Acronis sales team for closure (80 opportunities). The campaign ran across a five-week timeframe with typically five working days between email distributions. This ensured those contacts out of the office for a week would not miss the follow up email. When resending the email, the identical email was sent with a different subject line. Recipients’ email addresses which were no longer valid (hard bounces) were removed from the contact database.
Marketing Automation technology increased efficiencies in the entire process and workflow as well as reducing costs.
Results
The original objective was to get 65 attendees to attend a webinar (based on previous history/experience).
The final result was 140+ attendees with 10 immediate opportunities (worth approximately £50,000+ in year one) and one initial sale of £10,000. As a result of the campaign’s success the same process was applied to a secondary campaign within a three week time frame. This second campaign had equally successful results with another 140+ contacts in attendance.
As a result of the combined outcomes, the campaign has now expanded to other languages and regions within Europe. To supplement the campaign with additional coverage, a channel partner version was developed, used by Acronis partners to enhance their marketing activities.
The key to this campaign was to nurture the prospects through the campaign and create a pool of engaged contacts to be used in future, through more targeted campaigns, e.g. direct mail. This method of continued, ongoing activity aimed at educating and engaging contacts proved, and continues to prove, far more beneficial than a single campaign executed in isolation.
An additional benefit was the press coverage the campaign created – achieving over 60 hits, including Computer Weekly, CBR, Computer World, CRN and Computing.
Currently the ROI is 4:1 and expected to peak at 10:1.
Client testimonial
“CleverTouch is an expert in marketing automation and an excellent partner to support campaign execution. I’d happily recommend them to anyone thinking about deploying marketing automation or looking to get the best from an existing deployment”.
Ed Masson, head of marketing campaign management at Acronis.
