Building Funnel Value through Targeted Campaigns
A B2B E-mail Marketing Success Story
Company Background
Eaton Corporation is a global technology leader in electrical components and systems for power quality, distribution and control, as well as hydraulics, aerospace fuel, truck and automotive drivetrain and powertrain systems, and much more. Eaton’s Electrical Sector produces and distributes products to serve the power system needs of data center, industrial, institutional, government, utility, commercial, residential, IT, mission critical, and OEM markets worldwide. Eaton’s electrical equipment and services can be found wherever safe, efficient, and reliable power is needed, such as commercial buildings, residences, apartment and office buildings, hospitals, and factories.
Eaton and E-mail Marketing
Eaton’s Electrical Sector, headquartered near Pittsburgh, PA, handles sales and distribution of multiple product groups, including Residential Products, Industrial and Commercial Distribution, Facility and Process Control Products, as well as Power Quality. For all of these groups, e-mail marketing is a major part of the marketing strategy that focuses on several specific goals, such as:
- Branding and education: Eaton is an industry leader for sustainability and safety, connecting with end users, engineers, contractors, employees and distributors through eNewsletters to notify recipients of industry-specific news, product information and more. Eaton reaches out via e-mail campaigns to create awareness of upcoming training webinars and communicates pertinent safety and product information through eNewsletters.
- Funnel value for direct sales: Through eNewsletters and targeted campaigns, Eaton builds its distribution lists—creating qualified leads for sales teams. Like many marketing departments, the e-mail campaigns serve multiple goals, making it very hard to wrap up any one message or metric neatly into a simple description. The goal of this story is to share the highlights of recent campaigns in an effort to illustrate how best practices and even small changes can make a huge impact.
Challenge
Being a global business, the sales processes and channels at Eaton were firmly established. The Central Marketing department began to incorporate e-mail into the marketing strategy in 2007. Because Eaton has varied sales cycles for its wide range of products, and many of the products are often considered a capital asset by purchasers, e-mail takes on a supporting role in the sales process. With the goals outlined above, marketing had to prove to sales executives that e-mail was not “noise” and could provide significant value in the lead nurturing and qualification process. And with multiple well-known brands as competition, building the Eaton brand has always been a top goal. In addition to the sales reps’ poor image of e-mail as a valuable channel, the marketing department had to shift its own perspective of the “e-mail batch and blast” and look at e-mail marketing more strategically.
Learn more, download the Customer Success Story.
“Having a dedicated account rep that I meet with regularly has been extremely helpful. We have spent a lot of time discussing email marketing best practices and brainstorming new ways to improve results, grow revenue and create a better brand experience. Having an email marketing partner that cares about that kind of dialogue makes a difference.”
Katie Holler
Director of eCommerce,
D'Artagnan
