Design at Work case study

dotMailer takes design agency’s email marketing to the next level

Design at Work is a 4-person strong commercial interior design agency based in Bristol, specialising in developing vibrant and modern interiors for a range of businesses throughout the UK and abroad.

The agency operates in a highly competitive space, so retaining and acquiring customers is crucial to their success.

In 2005, Design at Work started experimenting with email newsletters, with the aim of keeping nearly 500 key contacts, including customers and suppliers, up-to-date with company progress and developing relationships with prospects.

Early successes highlighted the importance of the ESP they were to use

While the early campaigns were relatively successful, generating a number of leads, the agency quickly became frustrated by the lack of support and assistance available from their US-based ESP.

We quickly realised that email newsletters presented a perfect vehicle for us to communicate with our customers, and to generate new business. But we were keen to improve our deliverability rates and needed some guidance and help in achieving this

Easy-to-use tools and dedicated support makes all the difference

In 2007, dotMailer presented their email marketing platform to Design at Work, who were immediately impressed by the metric analysis tools the system offered, allowing the agency to easily track and monitor deliverability, open and click-through rates.

In addition - and crucially - dotMailer provided a dedicated Account Manager, available during UK office hours to offer best practice guidance and answer any queries.

As soon as we saw a demonstration of the dotMailer system we were convinced that this would revolutionise our email marketing activity. In addition, the availability of a dedicated Account Manager was a major selling point.

Anna Spratley observes.

We are still talking to the very same person that we initially spoke to! Whatever the query – whether a technical issue with the system itself or advice on the best time to send – the help and support is constantly available and is always top-class.

Increased deliverability leads to higher open rates and conversions

Working with their Account Manager to focus on improving their deliverability rates, Design at Work used dotMailer’s email marketing system to automatically clean and refresh their mailing list – removing duplicates and hard bounces and correcting errors.

Campaign deliverability rates instantly increased from 88% to 98%. The look and feel of the emails was also significantly improved with dotMailer’s integrated WYSIWYG editor using innovative “Point and Click” technology. Within a few months, open rates had increased to 30+%.

It wasn’t until we started using dotMailer that we realised the real potential of email marketing

, says Anna.

The improvements in deliverability and open rates have been impressive and we are delighted with how easy it is to manage analysis and segmentation from the dotMailer dashboard.

She adds,

if anything does go wrong, the solution is only ever a call away! Email marketing is all about measurement and experimentation and using dotMailer, we now have a much more refined marketing tool at our disposal.