Summary
Having established its name in the education market over the past ten years, Steljes, an innovative technology distributor, is changing its business focus to take advantage of the opportunities in the corporate sector.
Steljes developed a number of propositions specific for the corporate sector based on interactive products from SMART Technologies. These technologies are relatively new to this sector so Steljes used Cyance – a full service marketing agency – as part of its launch strategy.
Cyance delivered a personalised, multi-channel campaign that used data at every stage to identify, entice and educate target prospects and take them along a journey to a point where they would be willing to meet with a Steljes sales person.
By using a combination of web, email, telemarketing and surveys, this project has more than beaten its aggressive objectives.
From a standing start, Steljes and Cyance have created a lead nurturing process that delivers highly qualified appointments for their sales team, and will achieve the ultimate target of returning £20 of revenue for every £1 of spend.
About the client company
Steljes Limited is a privately owned company of 170 employees whose mission is to provide technology with purpose. The company actively sources innovative technologies from around the world that challenge convention, building their market presence and turning them into market leaders. www.steljes.com
Strategy
The strategy was to use an integrated marketing campaign to reach the target audience. Previous experience had proved that ‘not one size fits all,’ so a number of resources were specifically produced for this campaign to substantiate content in emails, gain an understanding of customer triggers and encourage a more in-depth conversation with prospects on the benefits of Steljes’ propositions.
Objectives of the campaign
The main objectives of the campaign were:
- Deliver 200 appointments/leads over a six month period from Jan 2011 – June 2011.
- Increase the Steljes prospect database for ongoing relationships.
- Drive website traffic to www.smartmeetings.co.uk to build awareness.
- Return £20 of revenue for every £1 of marketing spend.
The target audience
There are a number of early corporate ‘pioneers’ that have invested in the technology and are realising its benefits. Steljes wanted to increase the rate of adoption in line with their business objectives but finding such companies proved a time consuming and onerous task for its sales team.
This meant that one of the first challenges Cyance faced was to identify the likely type of organisation and contacts to target. Their research led them to target key decision makers in companies with over 250 employees and segment according to job function rather than organisational type:
- MDs/business owners
- IT director
- Finance director
- HR director
- Operations director
- Facilities director
- Head of training/learning & development
To start with, the target job title/functions were wide as there is no established market for this type of product. This meant that the email and telemarketing aspects had to work hard, and together, to quickly refine which departments within which businesses would be the key decision makers for the SMART technologies.
Media, channels or techniques used
Initially a series of emails were created and sent to the various target segments, all with tailored tone and copy and relevant to that segment. Each email sent used three subject lines (a/b/c split test), to ensure the best performing email was seen by the majority of recipients. Data such as company name, industry and first/surname were used throughout the email to deliver a more personalised communication experience.
The prospect journey could then be mapped to deliver different relevant follow-up email messages, based on the click-activity data (opens, clicks) of the recipient. In parallel, this click-activity was sent in real time to the outbound telemarketing team who then called the recipients who had opened and clicked on the emails. They knew exactly what a recipient had been looking at on the smartmeetings.co.uk website, and so could use this insight as a way of starting their outbound calls.
They were also armed with a series of follow up emails that they could deploy immediately after each telephone call. These emails were highly personalised and help to continue to nurture any interested prospect who was not willing to arrange a meeting. As these emails were also tracked, the telemarketer knew when to call these prospects back based on when they opened the emails and what they read. This allowed them to target the opening conversations based on the pages the recipient had been reading and use the resources produced for this campaign – such as an online ROI calculator tool, case studies, videos and white paper – to increase the effectiveness of the conversation.
A clear briefing to telesales ensured that this was done using the right tone of voice and appropriate business messages.
In addition to the email campaign, Cyance created two surveys on “Collaboration in the workplace” and “Business productivity”. In return for completing the survey, participants were sent a free version of the final report to download. Alongside the nine topic-centric questions, there was also a direct lead generation question “would you like to meet withSteljes to understand more about the SMART product range?” Eighty-seven per cent of collaboration survey respondents and 25 per cent of business productivity survey respondents requested a meeting.
The surveys were also used for by Steljes as part of a PR campaign and used as collateral at a number of industry trade shows, delivering yet further value and reach. Both of these emails again gave the telemarketers activity to follow up based on the opens/clicks/downloads of the reports.
Timescales of the campaign
January 2011 – June 2011
Client testimonial
“It is always difficult to take a proposition from the early adopter stage to the mainstream stage. This campaign helped us to cross this chasm by adopting an intelligent data-centric multi-channel approach to identify our target audience and ensure our messages resonated with them. From a standing start we have now developed a lead nurturing process that is maximising our sales people’s time, in fact my only complaint from them is they are getting too many leads – a great compliment indeed!”
Gordon Rimmer ,corporate go to market manager, Steljes Ltd
