Negotiation Training Provider
This case study focuses on the email marketing campaign that River carried out for a negotiation training business targeting the UK, wider Europe, and the US.
Email Marketing Case Study
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The Challenge
This client, who specialises in providing negotiation training programmes to Managerial teams and C-Suite level employees within large organisations across the UK and Europe. The courses that the client provides are developed in a way to minimise training time, reducing the impact of staff absence on the business, whilst still enhancing the learner’s negotiation knowledge and tactics.
They came to us in the summer of 2019 after being referred by another client and wanted to begin engaging with their ideal prospects more vigorously with a target email marketing campaign.
The Project
The client wanted just a simple introductory email to introduce the company and the training programmes that they offer, highlight the advantages of one-day negotiation training and the savings of up to £15,000 that the prospects could see.
The goal of this email campaign was to generate interest in the client’s training services and encourage their prospects to get in touch via email to learn more or schedule a phone call to discuss their needs further. Any potential leads would then be passed over to the client who would then get in touch to secure an appointment.
The campaign was carried out in three rounds based on the target location of the prospects. The first round of emails was targeted towards large UK-based corporations with at least £2.5 million in annual turnover. The second round was targeting large organisations across Europe with at least £2.5 million in annual turnover, and the final round of emails was targeting large US-based corporations with at least $3 million in annual turnover.
The client’s long-term goals were to expand and solidify their market position within the UK, while gradually expanding their training programmes into Europe and the U.S. – this email campaign was the first step in this expansion.
The target for this email marketing campaign was to generate at least 5 fully qualified appointment leads within each round of sending.
To ensure maximum coverage, after each round of emails a follow-up email would be sent one week later to all recipients who had not opened the initial email.
The Results
After the first round of emails was sent out, we began analysing the performance of the campaign and noticed the unsubscription was higher than usual for an email campaign of this type.
We noticed that users that visited their website also unsubscribed from the emails, and after taking a deeper look we found severe user experience issues with their website – which our website development team then redeveloped. You can view the full Email Marketing & Website Development case study on the Inspired Digital website.
Once their website had been redeveloped by our in house team, we continued with the email with the other two rounds of the campaign with a marked improvement in unsubscription rates.
While the first round of emails had good initial open and clickthrough rates of 38.6% and 18.9% respectively, the unsubscription rate was very high at 20.6%, which we attributed to the issues present on the client's website. Despite this, the first round still yielded two leads for the client.
In the second and third rounds of emails after the website redevelopment, the results were far more fruitful.
The second round of emails resulted in a slightly lower open rate of 29.4%, but with a higher click-through rate of 27.3% and a marginally lower unsubscription rate of 2.3%. The second round of emails and the follow-up yielded a total of 10 leads with Europe-based firms, which included a very well-known international tyre manufacturer with an office in Belgium.
Finally, the third round of emails that targeted US-based organisations saw similar metrics to the second round of emails and yielded 8 appointment leads for the client.
Despite the rocky start due to the client’s website issues, the campaign was still over the target with a total of 20 appointment leads being handed over to the client – 133.33% of the campaign target.
The client was blown away by the results from the campaign and their new website; reporting a conversion rate of over 38.2% and an ROI of over 450%.
20 appointment leads generated
38.2% conversion rate reported by the client
450% ROI reported by the client