Econdoms.co.uk

The Situation

Econdoms relies on e-mail for its marketing and branding efforts to reach potential customers around the UK. Specifically, Econdoms uses direct e-mail in its customer relationship management efforts for improved frequency and personalization of its communications to existing customers, to receive immediate feedback on new products, services and offers, surveys, and to provide them with crucial and up-to-date related information.

The primary challenge for Econdoms rested in combining a large volume of contact information with different messages for various types of customers or prospects. The process of merging this information was often a burden on internal network resources, requiring significant capacity and maintenance. Experience also indicated that managing positive responses, as well as bounced messages and opt-out requests, involved significant staff resources, with hundreds of e-mails requiring individual administrative attention received for each campaign.

The Solution

FreshContact online platform is designed to solve the problem of combining large amounts of customer information within an email message and efficiently managing the transmission and response process automatically. FreshContact's account creation allowed to upload and streamline all the Econdoms customers' data. In addition, FreshContact feature – Subscription form – enabled to enroll new subscribers to Econdoms Mailing List. To receive the email, respondents were asked to opt-in with their email address and name on Econdoms website.

FreshContact supports the sending of HTML email. This allows Econdoms the flexibility to place graphics in their newsletters, photos of new products, descriptions and news. In additions, FreshContact MailBuilder helped to create attractive and personalised email in Econdoms design style.

FreshContact solution improves the velocity and effectiveness of enterprise communications for marketing and customer relationship management.

The Results (ROI)

By using email for the distribution of news and training materials worldwide, instead of direct mail, Econdoms saves nearly $30,000 per mailing by eliminating postage and print costs. Econdoms can now keep its customers database up to date and realizes greater profit margins of FreshContact platform use.

Lists that once required manual updating are now automatically updated within hours of distribution. By alleviating the need for a full-time temporary employee to manually manage this process, Econdoms saves another $10,000 annually. Significant IT resources were saved by freeing the requirement of dedicated staff members that were previously needed to monitor the system during the 12 hours of send time for large email campaigns.

By using FreshContact e-mail technology, the returns are immediate, and the database remains constantly current, as the distribution list automatically excludes those who wish to unsubscribe from the mailing list. For example, very few people (around 2% from the total account of sent emails) asked to be removed from the list during there half year period since account creation. This low number of unsubscribers is the result of highly targeted, personalized and informative emails created by FreshContact MailBuilder.

FreshContact's technology tracks the response rates of each e-mail distribution list used within a mass e-mailing and immediately determines the number of recipients who respond from each list. Consequently, Econdoms is well positioned to continue developing targeted marketing campaigns that can quickly expand its customer base.

The Future

The ability to easily target prospects from its database and send personalized messages enhances the percentage of sales conversions for Econdoms. The increased frequency and level of detail in messages to existing Econdoms customers promotes loyalty and individual approach to each client. By lowering the amount of bounced emails and requests from recipients who unsubscribe, Econdoms maintains its solid reputation as a responsive and respectful marketer. In the future, Econdoms plans to use the new FreshContact features FreshSurvey and MicroSite, which will allow them to conduct online surveys, to arrange online promotional competitions, to invite new customers and let them leave call requests. These solutions are targeted to improve the flexibility when personalizing the messages and segmenting customers mailing lists.

The Bottom Line

FreshContact enables Econdoms to combine a mass of customer data with personalized message content while preserving control of the response process using a minimum of staff time. FreshContact also saves Econdoms significant time while greatly reducing the capacities required to create the messages.