The background
Wood Mackenzie is a leading global research company, providing research, analysis and consulting to some of the world’s largest businesses.
International teams at Wood Mackenzie specialise in the energy, mining and metals industries, where the stakes are high and intelligence is critical.
The marketing challenge
Wood Mackenzie’s services are high end, high ticket offerings, with complex and lengthy sales pipelines.
Their marketing challenge is to use targeted email marketing to support, build and develop a close and trusted relationship with key influencers and decision makers in the energy and metals industries. Marketing Manager Louise Barnes takes up the story:
In 2007 we acquired two new research and consulting businesses, each with their own legacy databases that I needed to dedupe, merge and migrate with our existing database. In the previous companies, email campaigns were sent using an internal system with very limited tracking and reporting. The campaigns generated little response and no measurable business.
I’d used dotMailer in my previous company and I knew Wood Mackenzie needed the levels of deep reporting, analysis and segmentation that dotMailer provides to reach out to this new audience.
The solution
Working closely with their dotMailer Account Manager, Louise set up her marketing team on the dotMailer platform and used dotMailer’s automatic deduping feature to merge the 2 databases to create one clean, deduped set of opted-in contacts – around 11,000 in total.
The team then began sending e-newsletters with dotMailer, providing valuable industry news articles and inviting click throughs to the company website for more information.
The results
After just 5 email sends with dotMailer, the results Louise had measured were outstanding.
In total, the first 5 newsletters alone had generated enquiries that converted to £87,000 worth of revenue and created a pipeline worth a further £92,000. ROI went sky high!
Content was targeted for each group, segmented by both time zone and region to create pin-point relevancy. Next, the team began focussing on segmenting their email database into ‘Supporters’ (contacts who had opened 4 or more email campaigns) and the remainder, dubbed ‘Awareness’.
The results again were outstanding, with the ‘Supporters’ campaigns delivering an 86% open rate.
This level of engagement provides the Wood Mackenzie team with a priceless opportunity to use email to nurture their relationship with key groups and build up-sell opportunities for their Client Management team to progress.
The next steps
The success that Louise’s team has experienced with dotMailer has proved a benchmark for the business, and dotMailer is now being rolled out across all 6 marketing teams within the company.
The business has recently upgraded to a dotMailer Corporate account and invested in branded ‘sent from’ addresses, advanced dotMailer training and new email template designs from the dotMailer design team. Louise concludes the story:
We’ve shown just how powerful email marketing can be for meeting our marketing objectives – from outstanding lead generation and ROI, to targeted, 1-2-1 relationship building.
We are already building on our successes, segmenting and tailoring our messages further, using the basis of our ‘contact source’ data to develop new relationships.
From the success we’ve already seen, dotMailer is set to become a vital channel as one of the techniques Wood Mackenzie uses to communicate with its clients, prospects and markets.