success stories

Opening Doors: making life easy with event notifications

The ever-increasing popularity of email marketing amongst companies of all sizes often boils down to two simple reasons:

1. It gives you the ability to reach hundreds of thousands of prospective customers, quickly, easily and just as effectively as traditional, large-scale advertising methods.
2. Unlike the traditional mediums, it offers an unrivalled level of measurability both in customer engagement and Return On Investment. In terms of ROI, this is a godsend to marketing professionals tasked with justifying spend to their board of directors.

Taking this measurability and combining it with more of a structured and focused approach can prove equally, if not more, powerful than the 'spray and pray' method.

Getting personal with the audience

As you might expect from a company that describes itself as 'strategic marketing communicators', Opening Doors have developed this into a tried and tested formula, demonstrated perfectly by one of their recent campaigns.

BASF, the world's largest chemical company, came to them with a brief to raise awareness for a ground-breaking product hitting the UK market, 18 months ahead of the competition.

Opening Doors' first objective was to establish a one-to-one dialogue with the target market.

Having identified the companies and organisations which would potentially have a need for the product, rather than buy in data, they built up the database on a business-to-business basis.

Building up to the campaign

This started with a simple phone call to introduce the client and product, gauge the level of interest, obtain contact information and request permission to start broadcasting to them.

They followed up this initial contact with a direct mailing, thanking them for giving permission for an email to be sent and specifically reminding them that an email would be received.

Gradually warming the target up in this way meant that by the time the campaign reached recipients' inboxes, they were already expecting it.

Taking this careful and attentive approach, while more time consuming than simply sending out a cold email to a database bought-in or gathered from sign-ups on the corporate website, means that more recipients are likely to open it, rather than dismiss it.

Triggering a response

Opening Doors wanted to get the most immediate and measurable feedback possible from their email campaign.

They decided to make use of email ‘event notifications’, which they had added on to their white-labelled PureResponse software.

These notifications were then embedded into the BASF message within concise and benefit focused copy.

Once the recipient had read the email, and decided they wanted more information, all they had to do was click a link and a notification would be sent straight to BASF.

BASF, having been supplied all contact details, could then immediately send an information pack out in the post.

The event notifications meant that the recipient wasn't required to do anything more than click a link, and they'd receive an email confirming information would follow.

Making recipients' lives easy

Without any online forms to fill in, or email to write, the process was made as simple and hassle-free as possible for the target audience.

Not only does this remove any potential contact barriers but also, in the mind of the recipient, instantly aligns the sender of the email, making life easy.

Les Wilcock, Managing Director of Opening Doors, elaborates: 'The whole idea of marketing is to make it easy for people to do business. They haven't got time to fill in forms, it makes life difficult and just creates a barrier.

'The easier you can make doing business with your company, the more likely it is that they're going to do business with you.'

Producing positive results

People certainly wanted to do business with BASF following the email campaign.

A few days after information had been sent out, BASF called the recipients to further qualify the information request and gauge the level of interest in the product.

Although the objective was to simply raise awareness of the new product, by the time all responders had been contacted the company had generated 52 sales enquiries.

It was such a success that BASF asked Opening Doors to delay sending the second campaign as they hadn't expected such a high number of enquiries and needed to put more resources in place.

Now that all the original enquiries have been turned into confirmed sales leads BASF are ready to have Opening Doors start the second phase of the campaign, set to be as successful as the first.