Kern & Sohn

The objective for scales manufacturer Kern & Sohn was to grow its reputation and revenue in the education and laboratory sectors. But how does a company achieve global reach by making the rather dry subject of precision weighing fascinating? 

Enter the gnome.

Working with OgilvyOne, Kern & Sohn used a twist on the travelling gnome prank. Gnomes are of course(!?) well-known for globe-trotting, so they equipped one with a Kern Scale and packed him in a flight case.

Scientists were charmed by the spirit of the project (it certainly stood out from the offer-lead corporate communications they typically receive) and they sought to participate.

Once they received the gnome, they happily escorted him to landmarks for photos – they even sent him from one laboratory to another, from the South Pole to the CERN particle collider.  

As the gnome travelled, each world-famous institution acted as a highly credible endorsement for Kern.

Perhaps the most value the experiment brought to Kern & Sohn was a personality. Becoming world-famous for sending a little gnome around the world certainly differentiates them from the many faceless science equipment companies they compete with.

The results:

  • Within two days the story had reached an audience of over 355m in 152 countries, with three requests every minute from people wanting to weigh the gnome. 
  • After one month 16,386 websites had linked to GnomeExperiment.com, pushing Kern to the first Google SERP for ‘precision scales’ in all five key markets (up from an average of page 12) resulting in a 21% sales uplift and a 1042% ROI.
  • There was even a TED talk all about the experiment and several countries added The Gnome Experiment to their curriculum. 

Berwin Leighton Paisner

The law firm BLP wanted to hire 40 graduates but felt it was either unheard of or unfavoured by students. Many students also had no idea why they should even consider a career in law. It’s objectives were simple:

  • With lower brand awareness and less budget than rivals, it needed to create a bigger online stir and get students talking about BLP.  
  • To win hearts and minds by painting an amazing future at BLP for students.

These objectives were achieved by:

  • Theming the entire campaign around the ‘amazing things’ students could achieve as a lawyer at BLP.
  • Making its people the hero, letting them tell the real story of life at BLP on an unfettered basis via video, an interactive microsite and blogs. 
  • Running a ‘Do amazing things’ social media competition to create a buzz about BLP

The results began to show within months:

  • Applications for trainee job schemes up 40%.
  • The campaign Klout score – which measures online social media influence and sentiment – overtook all its rivals.
  • Twitter followers tripled.
  • Facebook likes more than doubled.
  • Web traffic from Google doubled in the first month of employing SEO.
  • With less than £300 invested, Facebook advertising targeted at university students saw exposure of BLP’s Facebook page and the ‘Amazing Things’ Twitter competition grow from 1,014 people to 20,542 in just four weeks, with click-throughs growing from 11 in week one to 640 in week four.
  • City and trade press got hold of the campaign and covered it – the video campaign was featured in business newspaper City AM and the campaign blog was featured by influential trade site The Lawyer2B.

RS Components

Although RS Components operates a significant offline B2B operation, it recognised the need to build an online business of comparable success.

Working with Greenlight, the objectives were as follows: 

  • To deliver a 300% increase in SEO visibility in Google within just 3 months 
  • To find a way to intelligently assess and release the latent SEO value of their huge inventory 
  • To achieve this utilising ethical SEO methods and limited support from internal RS teams 

Given these timescales and ambitions, Greenlight took a ‘data first’ approach, utilising its technology to determine where time and effort should be applied for maximum return, in the shortest time frame.  

This was facilitated by Greenlight’s proprietary Hydra platform. Hydra utilises unique, patent-pending algorithms allowing the agency to manage and manipulate huge keyword lists, understand the opportunity they represent, and what is required to make them drive profitable, commercial value. 

This helped drive returns six months earlier than average SEO campaigns and with a negligible impact on the internal resources of RS Components.

Targets were exceeded by more than four times with a 1,300% improvement in visibility in Google’s organic search results, generating over 1,000% more SEO revenue than the site was previously achieving, representing £12m of incremental revenue from that channel.

Liberty London 

The department store worked with Ve Interactive to create a cart recovery, remarketing and optimisation campaign to maximise online conversions, supporting Liberty’s objective of being able to go direct-to-consumer and gain insight to foster relationships with all its traffic. 

The company discovered that 62% of abandonments were occurring on the registration/login page, in response to compulsory registration required, prior to purchase. 

To combat this, the following measures were implemented:

  • Immediate modification of checkout process & creation of ‘guest checkout’.
  • Installed VeCapture to recover data on a field-by-field basis.
  • Remarketing began through behaviour-driven email programmes, responding to the difficulty customers were having with the register/login requests. 
  • Simultaneously ran bespoke product feed campaigns for additional 31% of ‘anonymous’ customers who hadn’t tried to register or log in. This began increasing Liberty’s client base. 

The results:

  • Average remarketing emails sent per month grown an average of 1524.75%, with highest month peaking at 3387.63% 
  • Average Open rate per month grown an average of 5.25%, the highest month peaking at 10.19% 
  • Average Clicks per month grown an average of 569.07%, the highest month peaking at 1020.62% 
  • Average Conversions per month grown an average of 542.86%, the highest month peaking at 1078.57% 
  • Average revenue per month grown an average of 676.46%, the highest month peaking at 1239.04%

Glenigan 

Working with Adido, the UK based provider of construction project leads and industry analysis, attempted a strategic website redesign and digital marketing revamp. 

The objectives were to position Glenigan as the market leaders for construction insight online by the following means: 

  • Increase online website enquiries by 10%
  • Improve website accessibility across all internet enabled devices
  • Drive engagement with existing customers 

To achieve this Adido established critical user profiles including understanding on how they would find the site, use it and access it. It also created a competitor review from a creative, usability and functional website viewpoint to understand the current industry benchmarks. 

The Glenigan consumer was placed at the heart of the redesign via mood boards and wire frames. User journeys were planned to simplify navigation and maximise enquiries. SEO was built into all initial design considerations as well as templates for mobile and tablet devices.

The results:

  • Website enquiries have increased by 20%, growing 50% more than target
  • Mobile & tablet visits to the site have increased by 162%
  • Pages viewed by these devices has increased by 106%
  • Enquiries from mobile & tablet devices have increased by 775%
  • Mobile app downloads have now exceeded 3800
  • SEO traffic from mobile and tablet devices up 69%
  • Non brand mobile SEO traffic up by 90%
  • Target keywords ranking in top 3 up by 281%
  • PPC traffic up by 15%

MSD

The global healthcare company sought to create relevant healthcare provider (HCP) engagement and sustained portal traffic through fast delivery and precision targeting of its wealth of content.

Working with CreatorMail it launched a self-learning eCRM email engagement programme by digitally and dynamically publishing content. It additionally manages email frequency tailored to members’ behaviour and observed engagement data; using clear and sticky designs to promote emerging content appropriate to a HCP’s medical specialty.

Members’ activity is combined on the Univadis portal (through web analytics data) and observed email engagement to drive the frequency and content strategy. HCPs’ time is limited so dynamic emails serve up content to the user as the content happens ensuring maximum ‘share of attention’.

As members start to lapse, fully automated multi-touch reactivation messaging and frequency variations kick in, lifting engagement back up while directing recipients back to the most popular content modules in their chosen specialty. In the UK, 35% of the base was reactivated in seven months.

Optimised eCRM content for multiple devices led to a 64% increase in engagement of Univadis emails on portable devices.

124m Univadis emails were delivered globally; member growth rate of 3% per month, with most countries retaining over 95% opt in or higher. 

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For more inspiration, check out these seven email marketing case studies from The Digitals.