Next-Level B2B E-Mail Campaigns

 

You have a bunch of email campaigns running, perhaps for your event marketing or Webinar promotions. They’re generating good results. Congratulations! Your marketing department has mastered entry-level email marketing.

Now if only you could increase the scale of your email marketing and integrate it more tightly with your overall marketing campaigns, you could realize even greater revenue growth.

That’s the situation Pavilion Technologies, a leading provider of model-based software for manufacturing, found itself in last year.

Back then, Pavilion deployed email campaigns to promote company Webinars and its user conference, while reserving multichannel marketing campaigns, such as direct mail and telemarketing, for awareness building and lead generation.

Because these channels were isolated from one another, the marketing team was finding it difficult to quickly discern when prospects were responding favorably to which campaign, as well as to correlate Web traffic and activity to outbound direct marketing efforts. Yet the team recognized if it could consolidate all available information about a prospect, such as prospects’ recent site activity and participation in marketing events, the sales reps could identify the hottest leads and tailor their sales approach based on the data gleaned.

The marketing department also realized associating marketing activity with a prospect throughout the entire sales cycle would provide invaluable insight into the combined efforts, producing the best revenue opportunities. This information would immediately improve the team’s accountability and help justify the money and resources required for future marketing campaigns.

So it was time to take the email campaigns to the next level of integration, accountability, and visibility. That’s where Eloqua Corporation, a provider of integrated demand generation software and services, came in.

Pavilion implemented a number of Eloqua products to:

• Execute, measure, and automate multichannel marketing programs, including email and direct mail. Prospects are driven to Pavilion’s site to get information and be qualified to determine buying intentions. Every prospect action is logged into a comprehensive profile that’s automatically distributed to Pavilion’s sales team via salesforce.com so it can engage leads at the right time to close deals.
• Use real-time analytics to immediately respond to prospect buying signals with multistep, multimedia campaigns, including email, Web, voice mail, fax, and direct mail.
• Create customized, personal microsites to deliver targeted messages to prospects based on their company, industry, job title, geography, or any other database information

Six-Month Results Show Dramatic Improvement

Since working with Eloqua, Pavilion has increased its e-marketing initiatives’ effectiveness. In the first six months of use, Pavilion was able to:

• More than triple the number of email campaigns conducted per quarter from 3 to 4 campaigns to 10 to 15 without increasing headcount.
• Boost email delivery rates and open rates by 99 percent and 100 percent, respectively, and bring click-through rates in line with industry standards.
• Improve email tracking with better reporting on prospect behavior on the Pavilion site.

But Pavilion experienced the most significant results in its ability to deliver leads.

“Before we began using the Eloqua Conversion Suite, we were unable to track downloads from our Web site. Over the prior year, we attributed just 42 leads from the Web site,” said Jordan Weiss, Pavilion’s marketing communication manager. “After implementing Eloqua’s solution, we generated more than 200 sales leads from our Web site alone in just four months — an increase of more than 1,400 percent.”

Now Pavilion can run more marketing campaigns and generate more leads than ever — without increasing staff. In addition, the greater visibility afforded by Eloqua’s deep integration to salsforce.com has improved the relationship between marketing and sales, since the benefit of close cooperation is now clear.

This new enhanced visibility is especially critical at the executive level, says Pavilion CMO Matt Tormollen. “Now we can easily see the impact and results of every campaign, quantifiably and qualitatively. We know where to spend our resources to yield the highest return on investments… giving us an invaluable tool for validating our efforts to the rest of the company.”

What are your plans to take email marketing to the next level? Share your B2B e-marketing initiatives with Karen to gain better visibility for your marketing efforts within your company and the worldwide ClickZ community.

Want more email marketing information? ClickZ E-Mail Reference is an archive of all our email columns, organized by topic.