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A UX:Inspector case study
Prioritising action in the drive for centres of excellence By knowing exactly where operational improvements could be made to best effect, our client was able to quickly improve their processes and reach a wider audience more effectively The European Marketing Director of a very large global IT service management organisation had a concern that the in-country marketing teams were not using their prospect data in an optimal way, but he did not know how to quantify his suspicions. He had anecdotal evidence that best practice was not being applied across the region and was keen to understand overall marketing experience, to see how he could best improve it. There was a corporate initiative to introduce standard processes and best practice across the marketing teams throughout EMEA, and the Marketing Director wanted prioritise how these centres of excellence could best be rolled out. What operational improvements would bring the biggest gains in the quickest time? The business had sophisticated prospect profiling and lead scoring systems, and one of the main thrusts of the project was to find out whether the interaction of prospects with these systems was working in the expected manner, and was there consistency across the organisation. Settling in the trackers We crafted an initial UX:Inspector project for the client, covering the UK, the Netherlands and Germany, relating specifically to IT Directors in the Finance, Manufacturing and Retail sectors. We provided their technical team with 32 tracker email accounts to insert into their data, whilst using our organic insertion process to generate the remainder, as a test of the client's own web forms and registration procedures. After a 'settling in' period to ensure that all the data was in the systems and ready for use, we monitored the email traffic received by the trackers over the course of several scheduled campaign waves sent out by the marketing teams. Over the next three months we interacted with the marketing teams via the trackers, gathered data on the marketing experience of all the segments involved and compiled a series of reports to give the Marketing Director a detailed picture of the experience of the IT directors in the organisation's data pool. Month 1 - quick gains Within just one month the client was seeing benefit as our initial findings showed that 35% of the trackers were not receiving any emails at all. Drilling down into this showed that some expected industry segments were not being included in corporate campaigns, something which could be easily rectified, resulting in an immediate increase in audience. Also, data on registrants for a webinar had not been passed to other parts of the organisation, so marketing opportunities were being missed. Another early finding was that over 30% of the trackers were receiving more than one email per day from different departments, showing a lack of co-ordination across the different marketing teams. By addressing this 'clustering' issue, the Marketing Director was able to help his teams optimise the scheduling of campaign waves, which is turn engendered better engagement from the audience. Month 2 - revealing the issues Over the next two months, further trackers were inserted as the client wanted to widen the scope of the programme, and we were able to carry out further analysis. Some of the key findings after two months into the programme included:
A larger issue was that in a campaign to target IT directors, many prospects were receiving emails which were not relevant to their job level. The communications were pitched at lower, more manager-level functions, resulting in poor take up and therefore affecting the lead generation performance of the marketing teams. We discovered that the reason for this was that the term 'director' means different things across different geographies, and the content was much more appropriate to US directors than to European directors. This was potentially creating barriers to communication. Month 3 - significant progress At the three month point we had seen a significant improvement in the percentage of emails missing out on communication – only 5% were now not getting any communications at all. The clustering issue had also improved and the audience were seeing a more consistent pattern of communication. With these two issues on their way to being brought under control, the client was then able concentrate more on the messaging part of the prospect experience. Gaining longer term insight with UX:Inspector for maximum benefit The client extended the UX:Inspector programme to gain a longer term view on the progress they were making in the drive towards the centres of excellence. With the backup of hard figures, the Marketing Director was able to substantiate the anecdotal evidence of best practice failures and was able to prioritise a rolling programme of further operational improvements. |