TechNO Expo

E-Business Chatroom

Deb Notermann
Partner
Danna Mokumba
Vice president of delivery, Page 10 Group, Savage

We were engaged to set up an integrated marketing campaign for Plum-Choice, an online computer support provider for consumers and small businesses. They wanted to figure out how to drive new customer acquisition up significantly in a short timeframe.

They didn’t have information about who their customers are, demographics, or psychographics. We helped them create a client survey, do an analysis of the survey results, and put together customer profiles that described typical customers, potential trends based on the data, and recommended targets for marketing. We built a marketing plan from those discussions.

The first campaign included search-engine marketing on Yahoo! and Google, and media placements in USA Today and some radio. We developed specific experiences with vanity URLs. That means that we were sending them to plumchoice.com/usatoday, so that we could track how many people were coming in on that channel. When a   customer called a care representative, they were asked “How did you hear about us?”

The first set of online campaigns focused on a free consultation as the action point. If somebody were to get through the process and provide information down that path, we could track every step of the path up until they had a service consultation with one of the PlumChoice service representatives. From there, we were also able to track what the sales conversion rate was on those interactions, and what the average bill was.

Before we started on the project, PlumChoice was doing a lot of advertising on satellite radio. Customers were told to go to plumchoice.com. We put up campaign sites to really funnel them into that free consultation as their only point of interaction with PlumChoice at that level. We knew if we could get them into a consultation, the close rate would be 30 to 50 percent. So once they experience service, it sells itself.

The other goal PlumChoice had was to drive down its cost per customer acquisition. They wanted to reduce the amount of money they were spending by about 40 percent. We had to in-crease brand awareness nationwide. The most cost effective way to do that is on line, and given that its an online service, it only makes sense.