B2B Publishing
Breaking down the silos of an organisation to look at a problem from the customer's perspective measurably improved business outcomes.
Situation
A major B2B Publishing company was experiencing very poor interaction rates with their email marketing campaigns.
Insights
The company had grown over time both organically and through some significant acquisitions. Each of these acquisitions brought with them new customers but also, as we quickly discovered, duplicate customers. Customers that were on the books of both the acquired and the parent companies.
We analysed the available data and found huge numbers of customers that were being bombarded with marketing emails from the various parts of the company. Each of the divisions were maintaining customer email preferences, but none of them were joined up. What was worse was that a customer would need to opt out of several hundred types of email across 12 systems to ensure that they fully unsubscribed from the company.
One individual was found to have received 16 emails in a 2-week period. She was addressed in 6 different ways (Nicola, Ms. Smith, Dr Smith, etc), 7 of the mails were on subjects that were nothing to do with her specialism and only one did she open. She responded to none of them.
Action
Our first step was to create a single, master customer list. To avoid a mass migration to a single marketing solution, this list was kept in sync with each of the divisions marketing systems.
The first improvement to customer experience was to institute a rule that each customer can receive a maximum of one email per day from the organisation – first come, first served.
As we incrementally migrated the divisions to the central system for their outbound marketing, we managed to bring processes and technologies together. We used the advanced features of the platform to combine the marketing messages of multiple groups into common mails.
Finally we combined the email preferences into a single place, improving the customers’ experience and increasing the accuracy of segmentation.
Results
Open rates went from <5% to >25% and click-through rates climbed from <1% to >4%
