The background
Office supplies company and loyal customer, Staples was interested in Marketing Automation and asked us help.
Staples is the world's largest office products delivery business, serving everyone from a twenty-person office up to Fortune 500 businesses. The business-to-business division of Staples, Staples Business Advantage® works with these companies to develop customised programs with specialised pricing, dedicated account management and delivering a complete assortment of products and services.
We have been a digital partner of Staples for more than seven years, they are active in twenty markets worldwide and have customers in thirty European countries, making Staples the largest in its category. After developing the European websites for Staples Business Advantage, we started work on this new marketing automation requirement. Starting with a local rollout pilot to test its effectiveness, after this was proven successful global rollout was realised.
+475%
Increase in campaign conversion rate
+50%
More leads thanks to A/B testing
The collaboration has been and continues to be a great success. They understand our business, they are a proactive and strong business partner.
Marketing automation
Staples communication was not focused enough on inspiring and communicating business solutions. As a result their existing marketing proved ineffective and delivered insufficient sales leads. To fix this a new strategy was created alongside using Marketing Automation as a tool to deliver it.
We switched the campaigns to focus on the challenges and problems that a customer encounters in their daily work, whilst demonstrating that the products, services, and solutions from Staples Business Advantage are the right solutions to solve those challenges and problems.
"We wanted to make our communications more relevant. The right message at the right time to the right target group and to communicate it in a more relevant way. In addition, an optimal insight into the journey of both our existing customers and prospects is crucial."
Ellen DietersHead of Marketing Europe at Staples Business Advantage
Content
We built separate landing pages with content intended to simplify the work of an office manager, a facility manager or a buyer along with a site with inspiring articles about the transition to a sustainable procurement process capturing the most frequently reported reasons for switching suppliers. In addition we created a lead generator with whitepapers about how to optimise the purchasing process. Critically nowhere was a Staples Business Advantage product promoted, deliberately inspiration was at the forefront. Instead we wanted to collect data and insights on customers behavior through their interaction with these articles, videos and downloads.
Lead scoring
With the help of Marketing Automation, we are able to enrich the customer profile and learn much more about them. We use this data to help with lead scoring: Which customers are ready to be contacted, and which customers are still in the orientation phase. Thls lead scoring is automated, every action from a prospect earns points. If the number of points is high enough, a prospect promotes to a Marketing Qualified Lead. Via IP tracking the identity of the majority of the prospects can be found.
The results
There is a lot involved in this process, from creating content, to constantly testing to improve conversion: A/B testing emails, landing pages and call-to-actions, but also testing subtle changes with colors, text, and images. The results show that Marketing Automation for Staples was a great success. "It was fantastic to see that the leads came in and sales were able to plan appointments with prospects on that basis. We have been through several optimisations and have now found the right formula: this is the right look and feel, the right copy, the right tone of voice, the right medium", says Staples.
The results were:
> A new pipeline of customers with many qualitative leads in different phases of the funnel.
> Staples can now track the leads with accuracy through the funnel.
> Campaign conversion rate through A/B testing has increased by 475%.
Key features
Marketing Automation Strategy
Landing Page Creation
A/B Testing and Campaign Optimisation
Get in touch
Think we could be the right partner to help grow your commerce business? Contact us to see how we can help.