DM p18-19 Case Study Dec08.qxp 02/12/2008 10:42 Page 19
Case Study
the solution it was looking for. As a relatively small so gathering and digesting data in a handful of for-
outfit with 60 staff and a marketing team of six, mats like Excel or CSV from seven or eight sources
Howe felt that he and his team would benefit from was a nightmare for us,” he says.
specialist assistance to weigh up the options. “It literally took four or five man hours a day and
“We basically didn’t feel we had the skillsets inter- it’s all done pretty much instantaneously now. It rep-
nally to tackle such a critically important task for the resents a huge saving for us.”
Gathering and
businesses so we employed a consultant to help us Meanwhile, the solution also brings lots of benefits
digesting data in
and we managed to get the list of potential solution to Bales’ online activity. The company makes use of
providers down to seven initially, then down to a inferred data, gathered from analysing what con-
a handful of
shortlist of three who were asked to present,” sumers do when on the company’s website and formats from
explains Howe. allows Howe and his team to precisely target their
seven or eight
And the result was the appointment of enterprise marketing activities for individual customers.
sources took four
marketing software provider Neolane which was Howe explains: “We used to take a one-email-fits-
or five man hours
asked to implement its Cross-Channel Marketing all approach; now we can tailor down to a very
Optimisation solution. While multi-channel market- impressive level on email and SMS communications.”
a day – now it’s
ing practices and software solutions often take a silo The company also now has the ability to person-
all done pretty
approach with little cross-channel campaign consis- alise every one of it’s 50,000 pieces of direct mail
much
tency, Neolane’s product would allows Bales to use a three times a year.
instantaneously.
combination of channels collaboratively. And if it’s results you are looking for from the per-
“Neolane enables us to build a single view of each sonalised, tailored approach that Neolane’s software
individual in our customer database and to automati- platform has permitted, then consider the fact that
cally create timely, content-personalised campaign Bales open rates on emails has shot from just 8% to
communications that match our customers’ holiday 89% and response rates to the company’s regular cus-
preferences,” says Howe. tomer questionnaires have shot up to between 14%
“This is stimulating interest, interaction and sales. and 22%. Overall, response rates to Bales’ communi-
We run our campaigns with the support of just two cations have doubled.
non-dedicated marketing staff and can launch new But the biggest and most important indicator of all
initiatives at two hours’ notice.” is the fact that Bales Worldwide’s sales since the solu-
And it was this user-friendliness that played a key tion was implemented in May have risen by 5% – a
part on Howe’s decision to go with Neolane, as he remarkable achievement given the economic back-
explains: “After cost, which is obviously a factor in drop against which the success has been made.
the current economic climate, the user-friendliness of To put that in some sort of context, consider that
Neolane’s solution was critical for us. I didn’t want to according to the most recent DMA Email Marketing
have to rely on an IT geek every time we wanted to Council survey of the UK’s leading email service
do something. I wanted the guys in my team to be providers in the first quarter of 2008, their unique
able to use the system without too much prior knowl- opening rates in retention campaigns averaged 22%
edge, or specialist training. (versus 56% at Bales) and average unique click
“Thankfully, the user interface is unbelievably intu- through rates 8% (versus 41% at Bales).
itive and to be honest, most of us managed to get “By whichever metric we consider the improve-
cracking and use the solution straight away with vir- ments, Neolane has at least doubled our campaign
tually no training at all.” response rates,” concludes Howe.
n
Another user interface issue that Howe was
impressed by was the workflow which he also
describes as “ridiculously easy to use”, based on drag
and drop principles.
Not only that, but the whole solution was up and
running in under four weeks, and even that time-
frame could have been a fair bit tighter if it wasn’t for
a problem they ran into with the delivery of a new
server that was not under their control. Source data
extraction, cleansing, migration to the datamart and
matching to create single views took only two weeks.
Automated improvements
“Neolane’s solution has lots of automated functional-
ity too, which is important for us as we mail a lot of
personalised brochures – 50,000 three times a year –
www.dmarket.co.uk Database Marketing December 2008 19
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