RM supplies educational software, computers and services to schools, colleges and universities.
Challenge
Faced with the uncertain economy and increased competition in the educational market, it decided to take a drastically new data driven approach to its marketing, with an aim to reactivating lapsed customers and increasing revenue for underperforming customer groups – and all with a budget of just £6500.
RM had a number of specific objectives it wanted to fill. It wanted to promote its new online shop alongside the message that buying online was cost effective – thus also reducing demands on its own call centre. As part of this, RM needed to overcome purchasing barriers – it had identified through its own research, for example, that purchasers often assumed they needed a credit card to purchase equipment online, when this wasn’t the case. RM also wanted to track 100 per cent of its customer activities via Google analytics and internal systems.
The target audience of technical and senior management teams, such as school heads, and contacts within primary, secondary schools and colleges with ICT purchasing power was difficult to reach.
Solution
Previous buyer behaviour, past campaign results and real time data was analysed, then customers segmented according to spend, type of institution, region and previous product purchases. Personalised segment examples included Lost Lambs’ who had not bought from RM for three years but were previously frequent purchasers, and regions with specific requirements, such as Scotland, which operates a procurement contract system.
Previous campaign data showed the most effective time to email targets was midweek, before 4pm, with the best results achieved from early morning and lunchtime sends. Over a six week period, weekly emails were sent, with the subject line and content amended throughout the campaign using real time analysis of open and click rates. Follow up phone calls were made to customers using live data from Adestra’s Email Export Manager functionality, with sales teams initiating conversations according to segment open and click through data.
Banner adverts were meanwhile placed on relevant educational web sites such as Edugeek to promote RM’s website.
Results
In total, 196,350 emails were sent to 42 different segments, with 156 different variations dependent on customer behaviours. An average open rate of 12 per cent was achieved, beating non segmented campaigns four-fold. The average click through rate was 1.2 per cent, with peaks of six per cent. Overall, an ROI of 22:1 was achieved against a target of 12:1 – resulting in £1.25 million worth of revenue.
“This has been the most complex and data driven online campaign we have ever run, discovering, and responding to customers’ individual needs across our 400,000 UK B2B contact database – a huge undertaking,” says Julie Dixon, senior marketing executive, RM Education.
