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 communicate on a one-to-one basis with the 400,000 scientists within life science organisations and protected from usual communications.
Main goals:
- To understand what Invitrogen’s customers and prospects use to provide them with relevant and accurate scientific support.
- To find new contacts
- To develop a one-to-one opt-in relationship
- To have collected an iProfile for 75 per cent of contacts on the cleansed database.
- To increase the number of emails which are opened, read and pursued.
- To generate 350 primary leads
- To increase purchase of products online
It needed to be flexible to adapt to local cultural and data privacy issues. Invitrogen wanted to use findings to build stronger relationships with customers and help position them as market leaders.
Specialists in the field
Scientists and researchers are experts often working under pressure and with specialist requirements. Agency eMarket2 proposed a strategy which would change the marketing relationship, from one of interruption marketing to that 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
In return Invitrogen promised only to provide ‘information you want, the way you want it’ in order to establish a long-term, two-way dialogue.
Data collection
The EMEA iProfile programme involved the processing of over 150,000 contact records on the company’s database. Information was collected from email, surface mail, web, telemarketing, sales reps and exhibitions.
A systematic email marketing programme encouraged customers and prospects to complete a profile of themselves online, providing information about their interests. A lead generation question was also asked on the form. Respondents could answer either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and choose from a list of 25 key product areas. To maximise responses, three emails were sent; each mailing was only dispatched to those who did not respond to earlier emails.
The second phase 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 database was constructed of contacts who opted in to receive information. Data on 104,000 contacts (67 per cent) was cleaned and enhanced while 6262 new decision-making contacts referred by their colleagues were added. A total of 29 per cent updated their iProfile themselves.
Using iProfile increased the number of emails opened by 15 per cent while recipients moving onto the website increased from three per cent to five per cent. It generated 3571 sales leads of which 2427 were classified as primary leads. The response was impressive given that it was not actively pushing product offers or promotions.
It is now rolling out the same programme in the US and Canada. Through iProfile, Invitrogen can easily segment lists and now has a platform for building a regular and personalised dialogue with contacts.
