The Client

Emarsys is a global marketing automation business - offering a platform that blends customer data with communication channels such as email, SMS, social media - personalising these channels for retailers, travel companies as well as several other verticals. With global revenues in excess of $150m and very low customer churn, the emarsys platform was recently acquired by SAP and is considered “best of breed” in the enterprise marketing sector.

The Challenge

In 2019 emarsys faced some specific challenges in the UK with sales and marketing. Sales had a very high close rate, but marketing was struggling to deliver the quantity of high-quality sales leads that the sales function required to make target.

Internally, the CRM system had some data quality issues, and the teams wanted to move to a “Target Account” model - blending sales with marketing activities to a small and select group of accounts which the business had good intelligence on, and who they knew would be a good long term fit for the platform.

The Solution

Buyingtime’s data team took an export of all the emarsys CRM system, cleansed and augmented all contacts, suggested new targets based upon agreed criteria and gradually built that data - Over 9 months our team cleansed 900 UK accounts and 500 DACH accounts. All new data provided was GDPR compliant.

Our research and intelligence teams then gradually built market intelligence and account insight on 300 UK accounts to test the model. We gathered information about contract end dates, current platforms used, decision maker profiles and perceived success of current stack. This information was shared with the emarsys sales & marketing teams weekly - with back and forth around each account. 

Marketing at emarsys worked with us to design a series of automated but personalised campaigns - referencing the insight held on each account - each of which was delivered and reported on within emarsys (not outsourced to Buyingtime). All insight within each account was then tied to the engagement from the campaigns and sales were tasked with creating more 1:1 meetings with each target account - so as to better feed quality leads to sales.

The Outcomes

Across the initial 12 months of this activity, the program delivered an uplift in lead flow of 28% in the UK. Whilst the sales teams’ close rate remained as it was, the team felt far more in control of the leads that they were being given, because they knew the landscape better and were able to influence the sales more effectively. In year two, we injected more events into the program, adding greater lead flow uplift from this small set of target accounts.