Training provider City & Guilds are implementing a four-year marketing automation roll-out programme with dotmailer and are already seeing the results
Brief
City & Guilds is a leading vocational education and training organisation, providing services to training providers, employers, and trainees across a variety of sectors to meet the needs of today’s workplace.
In addition to providing qualifications, City & Guilds also offer a growing range of services to support colleges and training providers. The industry changes have placed greater focus on cost effectiveness, learner pass rates, providing real work experience and moving into employment.
David Morgan, Head of Digital and Marketing Communications: “Our challenge is to remain prominent in this space while also growing awareness and take-up of our wider services, supporting centres with their broader challenges.”
“To remain competitive in this market, we have to have high-performing sales, marketing, and customer support. We have over 5,000 business customers, ranging in size from very small specialists to large FE colleges, covering 26 industries and thousands of qualifications…so we have a huge variety of customer needs and communication requirements. “Clearly we’d love to tailor our marketing communications to each customer and each contact”
Strategy
City & Guilds have put in place a four-year programme to automate both marketing communications and management of customer feedback, with the aim of ensuring that all our customers receive highly relevant communications in a cost-effective way.
Steve Smith, eCRM Manager at City & Guilds has been responsible for the technical architecture behind the project. “We started from a base where each division had its own approach to the customer journey, so the first challenge was to create a single shareable process that could ensure everyone used the same key definitions.”
The need to understand customer behaviour across different touch points, and offer relevant content at each one, meant that from the outset City & Guilds knew they would have to build a fully integrated infrastructure.
“We need the web application, the email platform and the CRM system to be able to share information, and link that to specific purchase history to give us a real time 360 degree customer view,” comments Steve. “Not only did we need to build that historically, but we also needed to be able to respond to ongoing changes, such as their responses to individual emails and website browsing behaviour.”
Execution
City & Guilds chose SITECORE to provide its web platform, which offers advanced functionality including A/B testing and personalised landing pages, as well as the ability to incorporate triggers. dotmailer was chosen as the email service provider, enabling City & Guilds to move away from effort-intensive processes building a single email, to efficiently and easily crafting automated and targeted journeys across multiple emails.
The organisation has implemented dotmailer’s preference ventre, which allows people on the mailing lists to choose the kind of communication they want, as well as frequency and nature of content.“ It means we can make sure that we only send what is relevant,” comments Steve Smith. “This covers all kinds of information such as support, alerts and sector news in addition to sales and marketing.
City & Guilds also implemented triggered campaigns, which responded to the way users reacted to emails and utilized different message content at the same time.
Result
City & Guilds increased their total send volume in 2013/14 to over 1.8MM, an increase of 26 per cent over 2012/13 Web traffic has seen a 20 per cent growth in visits in 2013, grew their subscriber and contact base by 25 per cent, increased open rates by 13 per cnt and drove unsubscribe rates to below 1 per cent.
The advanced features of the triggered email program boosted open rates from 24 per cent to 51 per cent (over single sends), CTR from 5 per cent to 19 per cent and directly generated £125,000 revenue, an increase of 2,500 per cent over single sends. Overall, City & Guilds has seen a click-to-open rate as high as 77 per cent, unique opens beating 50 per cent and above all beating the sales target by 9 per cent.
The results from using triggers are very powerful – on every single indicator the impact and response was several times that of a simple email, and most tellingly the triggered campaign delivered a return on investment of 15:1.
One of the fastest growth areas has been from customer service teams who instantly recognised the benefit of being able to advise customers of changes to services.
Now that the key elements of the project are in place, all that remains is the implementation of an organisation-wide CRM system that can be fully integrated with the website, email platform and management information system.