The Hager Group is a $1.5 billion electronics manufacturer. With a distributed global workforce of more than 10,000 employees, Hager has 40 sales subsidiaries and 25 industrial sites worldwide. Much of Hager’s revenue is derived from sales to distributors and wholesalers. The company also sells to consultancies, architects and trainers who then sell Hager products directly to electricians, contractors and installers. This large and diverse audience of potential buyers makes it challenging to communicate relevant news and information about products, safety regulations and industry updates.
The olden days
Prior to Neolane, Hager’s marketing team used standard desktop tools to create and send out one mass newsletter each month to its entire customer and prospect base, whose contact information was stored in a spreadsheet.
The team relied heavily on the IT department’s support, and campaigns had to be executed after hours so as not to tax Hager’s email servers. Worse, due to the sheer number of customer contacts, and the technical limitations of these desktop tools, Hager’s marketing team was unable to automate management of bounce backs, opt-outs and de-duplication, or provide any sort of personalisation at all. They were not able to segment by audience type or capture profile information. Campaign responses came to a generic email box and had to be manually routed to sales representatives.
“Our bare-bones process was not very efficient or effective,” says Fabrice Canton, e-marketing manager for Hager. “It prevented us from getting to know the needs and wants of our customer base, and it wasn’t helping to generate leads or convert many prospects. It was time to make a change.”
They knew the first step to running a more profitable and efficient e-marketing programme was to create a rich central repository of customer and prospect data that could be used throughout the sales and marketing organisation. The execution engine needed to be robust and scalable with the ability to personalise messages, track individual responses, keep account history, augment customer and prospect profiles, and also handle bounced messages. Another important objective was the ability to centrally manage marketing content, and streamline and automate workflow for its scattered marketing team.
Building a 360 degree marketing strategy
After evaluating several providers, Hager chose Neolane’s enterprise marketing platform as the foundation for its new coordinated demand generation and lead management approach.
“Neolane had everything we needed for multi-channel demand generation and lead management in one package,” said Canton. “And importantly, they also had the in-house expertise required to build our marketing data mart.”
With Neolane’s help, Hager established a new 360 degree marketing strategy designed to:
- Generate website traffic through offline and online communication, search engine optimisation, and word of mouth;
- Build rich profiles on customers and prospects with opt-in web forms including qualifying questions;
- Use segmentation and personalisation liberally to make communications more relevant and timely, and convert more prospects into customers; and
- Promote customer loyalty by delivering regular, personalised content and information based on areas of interest
Today, with Neolane’s centralised marketing database and software, Hager can ensure data quality and deliver personalised, targeted communications according to customer and prospect profiles and behaviour. The availability of content, templates and user profiles enable both central and local marketing teams to schedule and automate campaigns in multiple languages, while working together to produce consistent marketing materials that support corporate guidelines. Built-in analytics functionality enables Hager to measure the success of its campaigns.
Neolane’s lead management features also help Hager intelligently manage leads – whether that’s weeding out unqualified leads, routing hot leads to sales, or automatically nurturing contacts to help move them along toward readiness to buy. Statistics and behavioural information about every lead (‘digital body language’ such as opens, clicks, visits, downloads, etc.) are automatically provided to sales.
Results
Neolane was implemented quickly – within two months. Six months later, thanks to their ability to automatically capture customer and prospect information, the size of Hager’s prospect database had increased by 80 percent, and quality improved immeasurably.
Today, the Neolane system allows Hager to capture 1000 new prospects each month, and it has achieved a 10 percent conversion rate due to improved quality of leads – translating into an incremental revenue increase of $42 million per year.
The additional 1200 new customers achieved each year through the programme represent half of Hager’s total new customers. And with an average customer relationship of more than 10 years, Hager can expect a strong recurring revenue stream.
