Brintech Finds Magic in the Mix Using VerticalResponse for Email and Postcard Marketing

Background

Brintech is a management-consulting firm for community banks. They work with bank owners and managers to supply strategic, performance, security, retail and risk management solutions to increase financial performance. Brintech’s sales and marketing efforts are focused on over 8,000 community banks across the nation.

Problem

Community banking has been a slow growth market. As a result, Brintech's sales representatives need to maximize each opportunity they have for contact with the community banks in their target market. They also need to track the effectiveness of all their communications with those banks.

Brintech's sales communications were inconsistent and had no reporting. When traveling, their sales representatives would copy and paste a message into their personal email and send it to between 25-75 bank CEO's letting them know they would be in the area. This process was prone to error and made it extremely difficult to manage tracking and reporting on email communications.

On top of that, Brintech had manual processes for their direct mail postcard campaigns. They were using a company that required a large minimum for printing postcards. Brintech would get a batch printed for all 50 tradeshows they attend a year and have to manually print individual address labels to stick on each postcard for each show.

Discovery

Brintech signed up for Salesforce.com in September 2008. They knew they needed a more effective way to send email campaigns and wanted it to report directly into Salesforce.com. "When looking at various options, we saw that VerticalResponse was a cost effective and simple solution, it was hands down the way we needed to go," said Susan Connor, Manager of Marketing & Industry Relations.

Solution

Brintech now uses VerticalResponse to send out a weekly email newsletter to different customer segments and send email invites to teleconferences. The integration of VerticalResponse and Salesforce.com allows for all email campaign reporting data to be pushed back into Salesforce.com so that Brintech can easily see all email communications sent to their leads and contacts.

Connor crafts the sales messaging for her team and then launches the email campaigns. After a campaign has been launched she sets the replies to go directly to the regional sales representatives. "Since signing up with VerticalResponse we have created a standard set of emails, this allows us to turn things around quickly and in an organized manner. I can quickly tell you what my open rates are and how many accounts we closed," said Connor.

After finding success with email marketing, Brintech also started using the VerticalResponse postcard tool. They currently send postcards to drive traffic to their events by including tradeshow booth numbers and an offer to stop by their booth. They also use postcards as a follow-up to leads from tradeshows and to request meetings.

Results

Now with a standard set of emails going out, Brintech can prove that about 2% of people they send an email to take action and set up a personal meeting with a sales representative. They also know that about 19%-20% of their current customers are engaged and opening their weekly newsletters. Additionally, they know that more people visit their booth at tradeshows because of their postcard outreach since a few people always bring the postcard with them to the booth.

"We are a relatively small company and to have a company like VerticalResponse to lean on, allows us to do other things we wouldn’t be able to do," said Connor.