The Company
Heinz Australia is a $1 billion plus food and beverage
company with five manufacturing facilities and more than 1,400 employees. With
a vast array of product offerings, and both direct-to-consumer and
direct-to-business divisions, Heinz Australia has built a reputation for
quality brands and products that Australians know and love.
The Challenge
Heinz Australia maintains a large portfolio of product offerings, ranging from beverages to fresh and prepackaged food. The company tasked its large enterprise sales team with personally delivering new-product updates to business clients and collecting orders. Understanding that its typically direct-to-business sales cycle is six to eight weeks, Heinz Australia began to look for a cost-effective way to stay in closer tough with customers and shorten its existing sales cycle.
The Solution
Looking for a marketing platform that would enable it to
segment and query its database—and thereby increase message relevancy—Heinz
Australia selected Silverpop Engage for its ease of use and robust product
capabilities.
Upon implementing Silverpop Engage, Heinz Australia began the process of creating a seried of messages aimed at achieving a strong connection with its business customers and introducing new product lines in a more timely fashion. Heinz enlisted the help of Silverpop's Australian partner, Engage Digital, to assist in building an email series designed to first establish preferences and improve its data, then allow for easily executed, relevant email campaigns that targeted vendors interested in specific product lines.
To entice contacts to update their information and outline contact preferences, Heinz Australia created a "Win an iPad" promotional email. Based on the data collected during the promotional campaign, Heinz Australia designed a series of email templates that gave it the ability to easily swap out content from one mailing to the next in order to communication information throughout the sales cycle. These emails ranged from seasonal product order reminders to product relaunches for items that were previously out of supply, creating an ongoing dialogue with business customers without creating additional work for sales representatives.
By adding email as a new sales communication channel, Heinz Australia has strengthened connections with its business contacts, delivering more frequent, relevant messaging. After its initial data improvement efforts, Heinz Australia has seen a strong average open rate of more than 47 percent on its product relauch and sales reminder emails, which have helped drive impressive revenue. In fact, sales figures from the email channel outperformed the combined sales totals for all Heinz Australia sales representatives during the same period.
Nicholas Simms, Commercial Manager of Alliances for Heinz Australia said that “by partnering with Silverpop Engage, Heinz has been able to compliment out traditional Foodservice route to market via Account and Territory Managers; and significantly increase our campaign go to market capability, by turbo charging our customer reach, geographical coverage and contact frequency. This has resulted in greater compliance, engagement and effectiveness of our campaigns and allowed us to deploy our resources in a highly targeted manner, maximizing our return on investment.”
----Download the PDF to learn how Heinz Australia achieved 200% increase relevant customer contact with its email program.