We have a markie award winning, customer lifecycle program for one of our products. Sales and marketing had aligned a 100% to make this a success. This product line also offers several valuable add-ons catering to customers needs. Now, not always do customers see the need for these add-ons while making their initial purchase. What if they try to access these add-ons, which they don’t have access to? We like to call this action, a burn.
Marketing and sales got together and saw the need of an automated program that could handle timely messaging, based on the burn pattern of a customer. We needed the customer to know what they were trying to access and what the advantages of purchasing that add-on were. In order to achieve this we had to further partner with Technology: for the product usage data and Product Marketing: for Content.
We had to bring in product usage data to drive communication based on the burn counts. We aligned on technology feeding a file to an FTP site everyday. The file contained admin/primary contact information and usage data. Usage data was broken down by the add-on (Each ad-on had its own column of burn counts for last 7 days). The file also contained some account information and additional usage information. We didn’t want to create a lot of contact fields for the same. Instead we leveraged a custom object. Using eloqua’s integration abilities, we set up an auto-synch to pull this file everyday and stored it in a custom object.
There was a need for 31 emails to account for the different burn combinations (A customer might access, add-on A only, or A and B etc). We wanted different emails to be able to report on individual combinations. But 31 emails is a lot of work. So, we broke down the email to have an introduction section, a section specific to the add-on’s information and a closing section with an action and a signature. Now, the first and last sections were the identical for all emails. It was just the product specific section that would change. So, we leveraged Activity driven content. The ADC would insert content into the emails, based on values in the fields that stored add-on burn counts. We had the first email created, made 30 additional copies and named them accordingly.
The emails contained clear and precise information, describing why one received it, the value of specific add-ons and a call to action. The CTA required the recipient to click in order to discuss the add-ons with their relationship manager. We already had information about the customer. So, we didn’t want them to fill out form on a landing page. We leveraged a blind form submit, which upon clicking would notify the relationship manager of the customers interest and also fire of a task to the CRM.
The program was created with several decision rules looking for various combinations of burn counts. As we had 31 emails to account for all combinations, the program was pretty big as well. We fed the custom objects into the program leveraging data card services. Based on the burn counts, they would branch out to their respective email send steps.
The highest performing email has an open rate of 58% over the last 4 months. We have received great feedback from sales for the burn alerts campaign, influencing 2-3x increased add-on sales. The ability of sending timely messaging and following it up with a meaningful conversation helped us see this success.
Future goals are to move this to campaign canvas (now that we are on E10) in order to leverage closed loop reporting and also leverage the product data further (reaching to trial subscriptions with a similar campaign etc)
The Fundamental series, email/campaign personalization, database configuration, system integration and form processing courses, along with the topliners community were influential during the conceptualization and build of this initiative.