Case Study – Reclaiming Names for the Sales Funnel

Background

The marketing group at a leading provider of collaborative business commerce solutions is constantly on the lookout for innovative and efficient ways to add new names to a typically voracious sales funnel.  Like every other business, this team knows that many of the names will fall out of the funnel before they turn into sales They also know that it was becoming increasing difficult and expensive to find new quality names.

The Challenge
A list of several thousand accumulated and previously qualified names offered an excellent opportunity to add contacts to the sales funnel, however the list presented some challenges:

• The list was a mix of lapsed customers and qualified prospects from several different verticals
• It was made up of contacts who had failed to respond to several different emails sent in the recent past
• Given the failure to respond, the accuracy of the contact information was questionable

Further considerations needed to be met in order to create a successful program:

1. With tens of thousands of names on this list and no assigned budget, final cost was a major consideration.
2. The offer needed to have value to both lapsed customer and prospect contacts as well as appeal across a range of verticals.
3. The messaging needed to be tailored to match the specific interests of each group.
4. Careful message control to meet corporate image and branding requirements was necessary.
5. Bad data needed to be separated from non-responsive contacts

Alternatives
A discount worth several hundred dollars for a high profile paid event offered the best opportunity to create a response.  The question was how to communicate the offer and meet the following conditions:

• A unique message was needed for each vertical customer/prospect combination.
• The creative required a “High Priority” tone.
• The total program needed to generate enough paid registrations to cover the cost.
• The maximum timeline for project completion was 30 days

So, what was considered?

• Email could be customized and was affordable, but had already failed to generate responses from this list.
• Direct mail offered customized messages, could create an impact and allow for image/branding control, but the cost was prohibitive and the timelines impossible
• Telemarketing, using in-house resources met cost and message control requirements, but could not be delivered within the necessary timelines.
• On shore, high quality telemarketing was time and cost prohibitive.
• Off shore high volume, budget telemarketing would sacrifice control of the quality/consistency of the message delivery and was not judged as likely to deliver revenue neutrality.

Guided Voicemail was selected as it met every necessary requirement

• A unique voicemail, for each vertical prospect/customer combination was recorded by a high profile company executive to communicate the High Priority of the offer AND allow 100% control of the message content delivery.
• The short set timelines and relatively high volume capabilities of guided voicemail versus traditional telemarketing/telesales allowed for the delivery of messages to 25K+ contents within two weeks.
• The complete post campaign reporting offered by Boxpilot, allowed the marketing group to clearly identify and separate bad contact data from unresponsive contacts.
• The total cost to execute the program could easily be funded with only a minimal response rate.

Outcome

1. Paid event registration created a revenue neutral program.
2. Other responses provided several hundred responses for the sales funnel.
3. Forty percent of the contact data was demonstrated to be accurate, providing 10,000 contact names for the marketing database for further follow up.  Marketing was also able to avoid any investment against the data that was shown to be incorrect.