A logistics network company with thousands of partners/customers across the country was finding it difficult to engage with them. The company knew that partner engagement is pivotal in maximizing the network effects present in this industry, and hence this was a challenge at the core of the business model.
The company also faced the additional challenge of tuning their communication to resonate with various stakeholders in their ecosystem – business partners, end users, financial partners etc., and also to their own colleagues in the Sales team dispersed across the country, far away from the headquarters in Bengaluru.
Solution
The solution to address the problems in this case required three parallel tracks of activities working in synergy. The first was to capture and engage with people already present in the network, enabling the business to take advantage of network effects, and also effectively cross-sell and up-sell the services.
This was achieved using a combination of marketing automation and growth hacking techniques. Automated email and SMS messages were used to alert stakeholders present in the network about supply and demand in real time.
A Social Media team was set up to answer customer complaints and queries in real time. The feedback from online engagement was fed back to the Social Media team as input to fine tune their approach.
The second set of activities involved targeting and capturing new users/partners, and ensuring their smooth on-boarding. Since many of the partners were not digital natives, Sales team was instructed to be mindful of that. With feedback from Sales team, marketing communication also expanded to include regional languages, and not just Hindi and English.
The Markon team worked with the Business team to develop target personas. This was then used to optimize the content strategy, and also a redesigned, user-friendly website. We also designed and executed acquisition campaigns that were tuned to the personas being targeted. Email campaigns were implemented to further nurture qualified leads which were then passed on to the sales team.
The third part of the approach involved empowering the Sales Team and keeping all stakeholders within the team in sync. A fortnightly corporate newsletter was envisaged and set up to decrease miscommunication and to ensure that everyone was on the same page.
CRM was set up to empower the customer care team, who also needed to know the supply/demand dynamics of the network in real time. Thereby they also gained information about the marketing campaigns and the latest marketing promotions that were active, and hence available to users for redeeming.
Results
The company received a huge boost in the engagement (~250%) and a sustained increase in new revenue and growth. The customer facing teams became well equipped to navigate the tricky ecosystem.
The company was also able to use this momentum to move into new markets and launch new products that were synergistic with the existing offerings. The internal newsletter was a hit, and continues to be published every other Wednesday.