The client company
Trelleborg Offshore develops and produces polymer and syntactic foam based products.
They are market leaders in the offshore oil and gas industry.
Strategy
Trelleborg Offshore had previously relied on reactive methods, mainly a website and brochureware to support its marketing and sales activity. Like many engineering companies, its messages were technical and complex. Trelleborg Offshore were not communicating the product’s benefits and failed to achieve volume sales.
Elastopipe had been developed for offshore platform fire deluge systems. It is a unique and innovative product made from flexible synthetic rubber, a better and safer alternative to traditional piping systems made of metal or glass fibre.
The Elastopipe product was developed and introduced to the market over ten years ago in the aftermath of the Piper Alpha disaster. This terrible event proved hard piping to be inadequate, but the price of Elastopipe was still considered too high. On top of this, most piping engineers were reluctant to adopt a new technology. The challenge was to launch the product and educate a hard to reach global and mobile audience with segmented messages.
Objectives
- Communicate ELASTOPIPE’s benefits to the market
- Increase sales/market share
- Highlight advantages over traditional products
- Maximise project opportunities
- Relate messages to all decision makers
Audience
An important part of the process was a series of workshops, facilitated by IAS b2b to identify and prioritise the market opportunity. It was clear that the specification process was complex and involved five key decision makers:
- Material technologists
- Piping engineers
- Health and safety
- Procurement managers
- Project managers
Media
Firstly, through IAS b2b’s brand asset management process a positioning had to be developed to clearly define the overall market message. We then segmented it to address the five key audiences.
The oil and gas market is global, very mobile and hard to reach. This made a thorough communication campaign with digital focus essential. We created a digital email platform – segmented email linked to segmented landing zones. These contained value added collateral like an interactive brochure and video podcast.
We had to engage the market by offering highly attractive collateral that simply and effectively communicated the benefits of Elastopipe. Only accessible via the landing zone, this helped maximise clicks and enabled capture of third party data.
IAS developed a new and unique digital communications platform for the Elastopipe launch. We automated much of the communications process and still created a more personal and engaging experience by responding to the users’ behaviour.
The clever technology recognised if initial emails had been opened, and if not it sent it again a week later. If the user had opened the email but not clicked through to the landing zone, it would automatically send another reminder email two-three days later. If the user had clicked through, a ‘thank-you’ email was automatically sent with relevant contact details and an offer for face-to-face sales engagement. All responses were sent to the sales-force, not only the name and contact’s details, but information rich data on what the user downloaded from the landing zone. The whole process creates a tailored and efficient journey for everyone involved. It also allows a highly targeted follow-up to take place and each email helps to convert prospects to customers. The chart below demonstrates the journey involved.
Timescale
Planning phase February-March 2009
Creative development and production of all material April-June 2009
Campaign launch and execution July-September 2009, with sales-force activity continuing thereafter
Budgets
Planning, management and reporting £5000
Creative concepts £9000
Data management and rental £3500
Email/landing zone £15,000
Results
The integration of the salesforce and the provision of online calculation tools has created real opportunities to develop relationships with new prospects and grow business within existing customers.
The generation of opportunities for sales engagement was crucial:
- 8,000 emails delivered
- 30 per cent open rate
- 10 per cent clicks (800)
- Nearly 1000 interactions with content demonstrating a high level of engagement
- 200 top customers and prospects received the direct mail piece and were followed-up with face-to-face or online presentations by the salesforce
- Two project quotes worth over £250,000 were a direct result of the campaign
Client testimonial
“This new and innovative campaign has moved Trelleborg Offshore and the ELASTOPIPE system ahead of the game in terms of communications and positioning in the marketplace. The information rich experience we created delivers perfectly on our strategic proposition and clearly educates the market and differentiates ELASTOPIPE from traditional hard piping systems. We have already generated significant sales opportunities from the campaign way beyond the marketing investment and our sales force and agents can now take advantage of the new contacts developed to generate further product sales.”
Paul Watkins, strategic business development director, Trelleborg Offshore
