Grande Afrique Consulting
Overview
What we did
Grande Afrique Consulting is a management consulting firm that sells software licenses. The SaaS product that they sell has a niche market – it can only by appreciated by people who work in specific roles such as Internal Audit, IT, and Data Analytics.
In June 2019, they organized a training conference focused on audit automation and tasked us with the responsibility of identifying the right people to attend this event.
The email marketing formula
They provided us with their email list (with ~970 email contacts), dedicated 3 salespeople to this task, and gave us a marketing budget of exactly $0 to secure attendees for the conference within 6 weeks.
Since the event was free to attend, we didn’t think it would take much convincing to get attendees for the event.
However, we had a big problem – the company’s email list was essentially exhausted due to the scores of emails that they regularly sent. Those people already understood the product and didn’t need another beginner-level training program.
We turned
to a source which could provide us with high-quality leads that were apt for our purpose: LinkedIn. Using the company’s LinkedIn account, we were able to identify and connect with people who fit into our criteria of the target audience for the conference.
We then extracted contact information from the connections’ LinkedIn profiles and proceeded to call each of them to inform them who were, how we found them, and asked for permission to send them an email with details on the conference.
The social media marketing formula
We put in place an email drip that automatically took specific actions based on the stage which each customer belonged.
Upon giving us permission to email them, we would add the user to our email software, which then sent them an onboarding email containing a brief of the conference.
When a user confirmed their interest in attending (we added a button that simply said “I’m interested”), the software was instructed to send them updates on the event in regular intervals as it grew near.
If the user failed to respond, the system would prompt them twice and if they didn’t take any action, would remove them from the conference email drip. However, it did add them to the company’s email list (which we segmented according to user source, purpose, and level of interest) so they could receive future company emails.
These were the results of the campaign 3 days before the conference was set to happen:
The results
While the users in our email list did not behave exactly like we expected them to, we were able to wring 148 confirmations by manual follow-up.
On the conference day, we registered an attendance of 82 professionals from over 50 firms. With a minimum fee of $5,000/year for 3 product licenses, it meant that Grande Afrique only needed to convert 1 attendee to a paying customer in order to breakeven on the event costs.
By the time the conference ended, they had secured 7 commitments to purchase software licenses.
We also added over 3,200 new contacts to their email list, thus growing it by over 230%.
