From brochure orderer to qualified contact:
AEB‘s content marketing strategy

The underlying idea of content marketing is to offer the prospective customer
well-prepared and relevant content in exchange for profile enrichments in
order to qualify the lead for sales. The individual processes should run as
automated as possible and be flexibly designed to facilitate the quick and easy
integration of new content.

Initial situation

The Stuttgart software company AEB has been successful on the market for more than 30 years now. AEB’s logistics and foreign trade suite offers companies from trade and industry as well as logistics service providers consistent “end-toend” IT support for their supply chain processes. ASSIST4 supports incoming goods, picking and packing, transport handling and customs clearance as well as freight cost management. ASSIST4 also enables companies to engage in active supply chain event management as well as monitoring and directing shipments all the way to the end customer. AEB is an international company with over 5,000 customers in Europe, Asia and America. Based in Stuttgart, AEB also has offices in Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Soest and Munich as well as subsidiaries in Zurich, Leamington Spa (UK) and Singapore. AEB had already gained very positive experiences with content and e-mail marketing in previous projects. Now a further project “Next level e-mail marketing” has been undertaken in order to further expand this field.

AEB brochure order form plus

In addition to many other communication media, AEB offers a wide range of brochures as a source of information for potential customers. The various brochures, flyers, white papers and books can be requested individually on the AEB website at www.aeb.de/broschueren. About 30 documents, grouped into six categories corresponding to the AEB solution areas, were available at the beginning of 2014. Users order the desired documents either via e-mail or mail by indicating relevant data such as name, e-mail address and mailing address. Apart from actually ordering the brochures, users can also request regular information by e-mail from AEB on the relevant topics in the selected brochures – with a downstream and automatically triggered double opt-in process. In a follow-up form on the thank you page, users can directly request a call-back about one of AEB solution areas and explain why they are requesting said information. At the same time, the e-mail marketing system automatically sends the links to the PDF documents. If postal delivery of the documents is requested, a shipping office is notified. Each document can be assigned to one or more solution areas. Furthermore, each medium can also be assigned any number of topics, for example import or export, making it possible to capture an accurate interest profile of every user.

Implementation

In a kick-off meeting, the requirements were specified based on use cases and a first rough concept, which served as the basis for a Proof of Concept (PoC), was developed. Various processes also had to be designed and elaborated. Moreover, different departments like sales and marketing work on various tasks, such as when a lead is accepted by sales (sales accepted lead). The project was conceptually supervised by the e-mail marketing solutions provider SC Networks and technically implemented in HTML, PHP, JavaScript and the programming language TAL, which is integrated into Evalanche.

BENEFITS

Benefits for editors

It is very easy for editors to enter new content. They only have to create an object with the new document and define the relevant solution areas and associated topics. The e-mail marketing system takes care of the representation within the categories as well as the business logic for downloading, profiling and profile enrichment etc. This makes maintaining the system very easy and virtually error-free.

Benefits for sales

The sales team gets high-value qualified leads with descriptive profile information that considerably facilitates the subsequent provision of personal support. The callback function provides the opportunity, regardless of the existing scoring model, to promptly establish a personal contact. Prospective customers can become newsletter subscribers via the automated processes and receive e-mails with regular information on topics relevant to them. Companies such as AEB are increasingly turning to EVALANCHE for their marketing automation and lead management campaigns in addition to their regular communication.

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