As an IT-managed service provider, Pegasus Technologies plays a major role in their client's day-to-day operations.
The scale and importance of their services means the sales process doesn’t happen overnight.
They dedicate a lot of time to building trust with prospective clients, getting to know them, and catering services to match their needs.
Pegasus needed to fill their pipeline.
They are well-connected, well-known, and well-reviewed, but their long sales process meant that having as many leads in the pipeline as possible was the most effective way to ensure they would win more clients in the long run.
When Pegasus Technologies’ VP, Erik Gudmundson, came to Bright Orange Thread, he already knew that Pegasus needed another touch point to reach potential clients, and he was hoping to tap into the power of email marketing he had been hearing so much about.
There are nearly 4 billion daily email users, according to Hubspot, and according to a report by the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), email marketing has an average return on investment (ROI) of 42:1, making it one of the most cost-effective marketing channels available.
This effectiveness is exactly what Pegasus wanted to tap into to fill their pipeline, and we could help them do that.
Email lead nurture is a form of email marketing that focuses on educating and sympathizing with contact issues to build trust and become the resource they use to find solutions to their challenges.
We used this tactic to avoid the hard sell but keep Pegasus at the top of potential clients' minds.
Our campaign involved sending out weekly emails, each with a different topic that appealed to Pegasus’ target audience.
Pegasus has 2 target audiences: the CEO and the IT manager.
The CEO is usually more concerned about the big picture. In contrast, the IT manager is understandably more focused on the little details of running an IT department, which means their pain points are different.
Every email also includes an offer to help prospects take the next step.
We set up separate campaigns for each audience and wrote emails catering to the different pain points.
The buyer’s journey is the steps every person takes before they make a purchase, sign a contract, or commit to something.
To create the most relevant and compelling content, we took an approach that targeted prospects at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
For the first step, the awareness stage, we created email content that provided valuable educational information.
This content would capture the attention of prospects by defining the problems they may be having in easy-to-understand terms.
As prospects progress into consideration and decision stages, we worked to present more direct and persuasive content, including case studies and specific examples, that would help prospects evaluate Pegasus’s offerings and move closer to a decision.
Marketing is a science. To figure out what works, you need to measure.
If you’re not measuring, it’s possible to waste months of time, energy, and budget on a tactic that isn’t working.
You must conduct experiments, analyze the results, and scale the marketing tactics that have generated positive ROI.
By closely monitoring and analyzing metrics, we gained valuable insights into the campaign's performance and made data-driven decisions to fine-tune our approach.
We kept a close watch on several KPIs to measure the success of our email marketing campaign:
By staying on top of these KPIs, we gained valuable visibility into our campaign's effectiveness, enabling us to identify areas for improvement and refine our strategies accordingly.
At the eight-month mark, we noticed a plateau in the email campaign's performance.
Despite our initial success, we recognized the need to shake things up and overcome this stagnation.
Embracing the importance of adaptability and continuous improvement, we swiftly pivoted our approach to reignite momentum and achieve better results.
To combat the plateau and inject fresh energy into our campaign, we embraced a "shock and awe" approach to writing emails.
The goal was to inject new and intriguing language into emails with the goal of captivating contacts, reigniting their interest, and boosting open and click rates.
The main requirment of marketing is that you have to keep going.
Too often, companies don’t see impressive results in the first 5 months of marketing and abandon all efforts.
Marketing requires a build-up of momentum before it really gets rolling. If you stop, then you lose all momentum and have to start all over if you want to try again later.
Admittedly, there were periods when the number of phone calls or deals generated did not meet our KPIs, even when the emails’ open rates and click rates were hitting the mark.
The proactive measures we took to improve performance during these times allowed us to...
After pivoting to the “shock and awe” campaign, Pegasus emails consistently achieved an open rate of over 15% and a click rate exceeding 4%, indicating a strong engagement and interest in the email content.
The email campaign successfully won Pegasus 6 new customers, the equivalent of $212,000 in revenue in 15 months.
