DigitalGlobe needed to quickly promote availability of new satellite imagery with more efficient global marketing organisation. It needed to be able to:
- Gain more visibility and control over its total marketing operations
- Decrease time-to-market for delivery of personalised, event-triggered campaigns
- Improve brand consistency across business lines, products and reseller programmes
DigitalGlobe is a leading global provider of commercial high-resolution world-imagery products and services for defence and intelligence, civil government, and commercial customers. The company serves many well-known customers including Google Maps, Google Earth, Mapquest, Bing Maps and Nokia Ovi Maps. With DigitalGlobe’s collection sources and comprehensive image library, the company offers a range of on- and off-line products and services designed to enable customers to easily access and integrate imagery into their business operations and applications.
DigitalGlobe’s complex business spans multiple industries, geographies and languages. As the company continued to grow, it became increasingly important to gain more visibility and control over its total marketing operations, and more quickly promote the availability of new satellite images to key verticals while supporting the DigitalGlobe brand and network of resellers.
Global Customer Demands Require Streamlined Marketing Processes
DigitalGlobe collects almost 400,000 square miles of new images every day, but the images are only as valuable as the speed in which they are made available to customers. Customers want newly available satellite photos of specific regions of the Earth, and they want them quickly.
Operating in approximately 90 countries with an outbound marketing programs team of only two or three people, DigitalGlobe needed a more efficient way to reach all of its market segments. Therefore, when considering marketing technology solutions, automation was essential. It was also critical to find a more efficient way to manage marketing work flow across channels and vertical targets, which was especially challenging for a small marketing department.
After considering other vendor solutions, DigitalGlobe selected Neolane as its marketing automation platform of record. Neolane supports the company’s growing business by creating closed-loop marketing processes for key aspects of its corporate and business-to-business (BtoB) communications programs. With Neolane’s marketing software, DigitalGlobe has centralised and automated important internal and external marketing programs. Improved efficiencies include whittling down the multi-step process of alerting customers and prospects through email and other channels about the availability of new images. In fact, what was once a several week endeavor now only takes a few days to execute.
Providing the backbone for a successful global cross-channel programme
While triggered email alerts are the centrepiece of DigitalGlobe’s automated, unified marketing campaigns, the company quickly realised the benefits of Neolane’s powerful platform to automate global campaigns that involved multiple other channels. DigitalGlobe and Neolane developed user communities, via microsites, for each of the company’s vertical industry targets. This helped better capture and manage leads as participants subscribed to a new-image alert system. To facilitate the triggered e-mail notification program, DigitalGlobe integrated its image banks with Neolane’s platform, with new images activating alerts to appropriate subscribers.
CRM integration and lead quality
Neolane also supported the company’s lead management programs including lead routing, scoring and nurturing. Integrating Neolane’s Lead Management Optimisation solution with its existing CRM system, DigitalGlobe has been able to better segment, target and personalise leads generated from multiple channels – including web, trade shows and email – while helping to measure the impact of specific campaigns on company revenue.
“Neolane is a powerful platform that integrated with our existing CRM system and supports key aspects of our global marketing organisation,” said Sara Poulton, senior director of marketing, DigitalGlobe.
Neolane helped de-dupe and qualify leads being funnelled into the company’s prospect database. Of the leads Neolane is passing through the system, only 0.02 per cent require merging with existing leads or contacts, which is an important indicator of lead quality.
Extending the boundaries of marketing’s impact
The results of DigitalGlobe’s new global marketing overhaul are impressive. DigitalGlobe currently runs approximately 50 campaigns per month, with only one junior marketing person. Customer alert cycles were reduced from weeks to days, allowing for quick notification about the availability of new images. Its e-mail promotion and alert campaign benefitted from a 10 per cent to 15 per cent improvement in open rates, with bounce-back rates reduced “dramatically” through house list hygiene. The new subscription alert centre gained more than 1,000 subscribers via a dedicated e-mail campaign of its own, with only 0.33% per cent opting out since then.
“We had a big vision for what we wanted from an enterprise marketing solution, and Neolane has delivered. Since implementing the Neolane platform, we have extended the boundaries of what our marketing programs are able to achieve by simplifying and automating key processes while supporting consistent messaging and brand image across our business lines and products,” said Poulton.
Neolane easily scaled to meet the growing marketing communications needs of DigitalGlobe’s business. Overall benefits include brand consistency, improved worldwide marketing effectiveness and more efficient delivery of personalised, event-triggered campaigns across channels, products and geographies. Additionally, Neolane helped DigitalGlobe unite sales and marketing teams, better leverage internal resources across business units, and create standard marketing templates that can be co-branded with resellers, helping to overcome challenges with brand consistency.
Results:
- Decreased customer alert cycles from weeks to days
- Improved email open rates by 10-15 per cent with bounce-back rates reduced dramatically
- Improved quality of leads with only 0.02 per cent of the leads requiring merging with existing leads or contacts
