Background
Information Arts has been a valued partner to Vodafone for over 6 years. In that time the business has completely changed in its approach to B2B lead generation in the UK.
In their most recent collaboration, started in 2009, Information Arts was briefed to improve Vodafone Enterprise UK’s prospect targeting. Information Arts advocated a strategic nurturing approach, instead of the single channel and adhoc method previously employed.. Vodafone recognised that it is vital to treat information about potential customers as valuable assets, so they tasked Information Arts to propose and develop a solution that could rapidly increase revenue cost effectively and measurably, reducing operating costs in line with reduced budgets.
Challenge
Vodafone needed a continuous pipeline of high quality prospects, nurtured to the point of decision-making, which they could then pass to sales to convert into valuable new contracts. To execute this Information Arts proposed a bespoke and integrated system that would deliver multi-channel communications to prospects selected from a tuned, segmented prospect database.
Strategy and Execution
Working closely with Vodafone, Information Arts developed and hosted a bespoke B2B customer marketing database environment: Prospector. Prospector needed to be a fast to implement, simple to use, flexible and scalable solution. In the current financial climate it also had to be cost-effective.
Prospector features a bespoke blended, segmented and scored prospect pool of UK business data. Key components of prospect are integrated tools for data visualisation, analysis, reporting and campaign management and email execution. Prospector has the capability to support multi-channel communications activity. This allows Vodafone to use one single database to feed into all B2B marketing, including digital, outbound calling and direct mail.
The Prospector project started with Information Arts developing a pilot system which delivered a single channel marketing database designed primarily for outbound Telemarketing acquisition activity. The database let the marketing team have access to data of greater relevance faster than before, so they could make tactical campaign decisions accurately and quickly.
On the back of the success from the initial pilot system which demonstrated that this approach would generate strong results, Vodafone invested in increasing the channels of communication from Telemarketing to Digital, Fax and Direct Mail.
A specially tailored and segmented pool of prospects was then developed. This database had the unique ability to add new data sources rapidly. So when new data was tested, the sections that were most relevant and beneficial to Vodafone were quickly integrated, helping to constantly refine and improve campaign results. Adding the rapid adjustments part to Prospector enabled direct feedback from Vodafone’s telemarketing agencies and responses from digital campaigns using email and micro-sites. Information captured as the campaigns were live, such as contract end dates and personnel changes, fed into Vodafone’s ongoing acquisition strategy and refined the segmentation.
Prospector gathers this information from every campaign, whatever the touch point, so Vodafone can track campaign histories, spot trends, target accurately and tune their models. All data sources are updated as frequently as possible to supply ‘hot leads’ for campaign selection. Prospector only imports cold data if it can clearly add value to the prospect database, measured by a applying a bespoke process developed by Information Arts . Prospector is used for all prospect campaigns executed by Vodafone Enterprise.
Results
To implement Prospector successfully for Vodafone Enterprise Information Arts designed a system that was cost effective, efficient and easy to use.
Prospector is the first B2B multi-channel, closed-loop prospect management system and provides an innovative model for efficient prospect targeting and nurturing. It has enabled Vodafone Enterprise to execute campaigns using telemarketing, email, fax and direct mail. It reduced the time from campaign planning to execution from days to as little as 4 hours’ turnaround.
The decision to carefully select only the most relevant leads increases Vodafone’s return on investment. Prospector therefore provides Vodafone with a database which, over time, improves in performance at a ever-reducing cost. In terms of data quality, addressability has increased by 14% and company recognition by 27%.
The market demand model was introduced and used for data selection, which in some campaigns has resulted in 95% increase in prospect responsiveness. The Prospector system has both saved Vodafone money and reduced waste.
