SITUATION:
Sometimes, despite your best efforts – a lead is simply not ready to become a paying customer. This is particularly prevalent – as we found at GetSmarter – where we were selling an in demand service via far reaching media efforts. It’s bound to happen – you are going to get many leads and a handful of customers – conversion science 101.
One of the massively beneficial byproducts of the lead generation process at GetSmarter however, was consumer data. In this day and age consumer data is priceless – knowing that a customer has given us their consent to contact them until they say otherwise is powerful and it’s vital that you don’t forget about these leads as you could be sitting on heaps more revenue.
To date, older leads had been contacted with a blanket approach but not with a great deal of success. One of my objectives in my role as head of CRM at GetSmarter was to change that.
APPROACH:
The email channel was the most logical means of contacting these consumers. It is an affordable channel and can still have a massive impact of done correctly.
The main problem however was the clutter. Think about how many emails you receive on a daily basis. How many is it? More than 20? More than 50? More than a 100? Research suggests that the average consumer receives is well over 100. Every day. That’s 3000 emails a month.
To empower ourselves to break through the noise, we needed one important thing; a laser focus. This meant:
- An appreciation for the consumer context (i.e. the course they were originally interested in)
- Have had at least a 6 month ‘cool down’ period had elapsed (to allow their situation to change). And a maximum of 24 months to ensure we weren’t forgotten
- Relevance of message (content that spoke specifically to the above)
- Timing – we needed to deliver this message a couple of days from the start of the course (to drive urgency)
- This ultimately translated into a series of small, tight databases – a contrary view to the one that is often held when it comes to databases – that bigger is better.
We trialled this on a number of courses initially and off the bat it was clear that we had tapped into a lucrative revenue stream.
RESULTS:
- Emails enjoyed an above average open rate – across the board
- Similarly, click to open rates were well above the norm
- Over a 5 month period, this revised email stream contributed 200 new conversions (well over R2m in revenue)