Yellow Pages Easy Find II

Background
In late 2000, and in conjunction with Brave New World, Yellow Pages initiated a programme to help New Zealand’s small businesses better market themselves online and understand the role of the internet in their advertising mix.

A key component of this programme is YellowBiz, a monthly email newsletter that offers information on online marketing, email marketing, database management and brand development.

Additionally, it’s been a goal of Yellow Pages to evolve the email channel into a strong retention and cross-sell platform, with Touchpoint driving the technology.

Over the years, Yellow Pages has also used email as part of multi-channel, direct response campaigns to sell Internet Yellow Pages products to existing and new customers.

The Easy Find II campaign ran in late 2002 and represents a best practise example of a multi-channel acquisition campaign that has consistently delivered high sales and return on investment.

Objectives

• Sell the Easy Find package which includes an Internet Yellow Pages Email Link and Headline (priced at $20 + GST per month)
• Ensure fast payback
• Increase paid internet revenue and paid customer penetration

Target Audience

This campaign was targeted at companies that are listed in high penetration Internet Yellow Pages classifications, have not already purchased Internet Yellow Pages products and have not been already contacted as part of a campaign involving telemarketing.

Channels

Touchpoint implemented/managed the following components of the campaign:

• Email
• Fax

Other components:

• External call centre

Approach
Datamining of existing customer databases was carried out to extract the best prospects. These companies fell into the following categories:

• Companies in Internet Yellow Pages categories with the highest penetration of Internet Yellow Pages products
• Companies that had not yet purchased Internet Yellow Pages products but had the highest likelihood of doing so
• Companies unlikely to purchase or that were offered similar packages in recent campaigns

The call centre carried out initial telemarketing to the first two categories. The call centre’s sales people were armed with relevant details of the target’s business, tools to determine where the business appeared in Internet Yellow Pages search results, comparative information on where the business’ competitors ranked, and three different product package offers.

It was the job of call centre staff to identify hot prospects, determine the most appropriate package for the customer, collect contact details and send a personalised email or fax brochure via Touchpoint.

On receiving the email or fax brochure, customers had the option to order online or by phone. If the call centre received no response, they carried out a follow up call to close the sale.

All orders from the customer or the call centre were entered into Touchpoint and forwarded to Yellow Pages for fulfilment. Then the customer was sent an email alerting them of their order’s completion.

Where possible, new customers were signed up to receive YellowBiz as well as Yellow Pages book close alerts.

How Touchpoint Technology Helped

Touchpoint was used to manage and coordinate this campaign’s call centre, internet and email components, offering the following benefits:

• Datamining of customer databases selected the top 20% of prospects. Previous campaigns showed that this approach increased sales and return on investment by 30-40%
• Personalised email brochures provided significant improvements in the sales cycle – for instance, email reduced follow up lead time to 4-8 hours instead of 3-4 days
• HTML emails provided for personalisation of rich digital brochures
• One-click ordering made the sales process very easy for customers
• Prospects, communications and orders could be tracked in real-time by Yellow Pages, Brave New World and the call centre
• The same system processed both call centre and customer-direct orders
• A central database allowed for in-depth post-campaign analysis of results

Additionally, the call centre’s technology allowed for sampling of calls over the internet to assist in refining telemarketing components of campaign

Results
The Easy Find II campaign generated a return on investment of 175% – the highest ever for a Yellow Pages campaign. 1427 initial orders resulted in 1283 final sales exceeding the target annualised revenue by 21%.