Making Cross-Selling Effective Again

This month's case study comes from Sage Software, which sells business management and accounting software to small and mid-sized businesses. Sage is a billion-dollar company, but before Printing News readers dismiss this campaign as relevant only to "the big guys," let's focus on the principle behind it.

Sage Software sells applications for accounting, payroll, human resources, distribution, and project management to an array of industry verticals, including non-profits, construction, and real estate.

The challenge the company was facing was that its growth had come through acquisition. Consequently, while it was a single company, it was acting like nearly a dozen different ones, each with different customer bases, mailing lists, and marketing campaigns. (Sound like any customers you know?)

In a company like Sage, the cross-selling and upselling opportunities ought to be terrific. Its best prospects are already in its customer base, and once customers have one piece of software, they are likely to benefit from others. But with each marketing department acting independently, its efforts had been unsuccessful.

Each business unit was doing one-off campaigns targeting one another's customer bases. (For example, one customer might receive 10 different campaigns, each on a different product.) Even after multiple touches with different campaigns, Sage's research showed that its customers' awareness of its entire portfolio of products was low.

Want More Results? Integrate It!

Sage decided to put an overall strategy in place for targeting its customer base and telling the whole "Sage story." Sage not only wanted to increase customer awareness of the full line of products, but dramatically increase its effectiveness and cross-selling of products, as well.

Another—less obvious—goal was to capture email addresses. Previously, Sage Software had found that, if it had the email address for a customer, that customer tended to spend $1,000 more per year than those for which it did not have an email address. For this reason, Sage wanted to capture contact e-mail addresses, as well as verify and clean up contact information.

The first step was to create an integrated direct marketing initiative. To do this, Sage:

• pulled together a project creative and marketing team that included key players from different divisions of the company;
• developed new branding and creative ("Go. Explore. Discover.") to create a fresh look; and
• centralized the monitoring and management of the campaign, regardless of the product vertical, so it could track the results in real time and provide actionable leads that could be followed up immediately.

The result was the "Sage 360° Personalized URL" campaign.

Driving to the Personalized URL

Sage targeted 136,000 customers using variable 1:1 direct mail and e-mail follow-up to drive customers to a personalized URL. The ability to monitor real-time campaign activity was accomplished via MindFire's online dashboard called Look Who's Clicking.

In order to drive customers to their personalized URL, Sage Software used a direct mail postcard and a powerful incentive—a 128 MB Flash drive and an opportunity to win a free laptop.

The mailer read,

> Claim Your Free Gift!

See Inside for Details.

Inside were details of the offer. To boost responses, Sage sent a personalized follow-up email in conjunction with the postcard.

Once recipients logged in using their personalized URLs, they were welcomed and presented with their contact information. If information was missing (such as e-mail address), they had to input that information in order to continue. If information was incorrect, they had an opportunity to correct it.