Abcam implements Neolane to win healthy B2B marketing results

Abcam, owner of one of the world’s largest catalogs of antibodies, engages

Neolane’s conversational marketing technology to conduct high-response,

one-to-one personalized B2B campaigns

Customer name: AbcamIndustry: Life Sciences/Pharma/ Bio-tech/B2B eCommerceBusiness Need: Create effective B2B marketing communications in ten languages. Engage with a rapidly growing number of bio-tech scientists worldwide, while promoting a catalog of 67,000+ products

“We needed a smarter, more user-friendly and scalable solution to meet our requirement for delivering personalized content to our rapidly expanding customer base. We evaluated a number of tools, but were at fi rst disappointed by their infl exibility and lack of sophistication. Then we discovered Neolane.”

Jim Warwick, Chief Operating Offi cer at Abcam

TECHNOLOGY ENVIRONMENT• Custom ERP and CRM system

• SQL Server

• On-site licence

OBJECTIVES• Increase campaign deliverability,

relevancy, reactivity and sales

• Reduce complexity, timeframes and cost

• Improve adherence to preferred techniques and procedures

RESULTS• Reduced new campaign creation time

by approximately 35 percent, saving 48 staff days/year

• Achieved email open rates of 18.4 percent and click-throughs of about 3.6 percent

• Email deliverability rates now typically exceed 96 percent

Abcam is a producer and distributor of research-grade antibodies with offi ces located in the UK, U.S., Japan and Hong Kong. The company produces and distributes its own and third-party produced antibodies to academic and commercial users in over 70 countries. With an online catalogue of over 67,000 products, Abcam covers hundreds of disciplines including cancer, immunology and neuroscience. The company’s vision is to build the largest online antibody resource in the world while also ensuring that the antibodies are of high quality and commercially viable. Some 600-800 new products are added to the catalog every month.

Challenging customer communications“Each of our customers is a specialist and our challenge is to generate timely content that’s specifi c to their fi eld of activity,” said Jim Warwick, chief operating offi cer at Abcam. “Only by seeing the subject matter as directly relevant to them, will an individual open it, read it and perhaps click-through to the Abcam website.”

Abcam’s main channel of outbound customer communication is email. Customers can opt-in via the website to receive newsletters on their area of research, product updates and other marketing content such as regional news, promotions and invitations to Abcam scientifi c conferences.

In its early days, the company developed a proprietary email marketing application, which allowed marketers to semi-automate rudimentary segmented campaigns. Requiring SQL database query skills for any advanced segmentation and the ability to write html code, IT support was often required. As the company grew its product range, customer base and the number of campaigns it needed to run, it began to reach the limits of its in-house tool.

Reporting was limited, too. Although click-throughs were measurable, open rates

and deliverability could at best only be roughly estimated, making it hard to direct improvements.

Additionally, the email application couldn’t support the marketing best practices Abcam wanted to introduce, such as highly refi ned content personalization, campaign testing and event-triggered emails.

Seeking a scalable solution“We needed a smarter, more user-friendly and scalable solution to meet our requirement for delivering personalized content to our rapidly expanding customer base,” said Warwick. “We evaluated a number of tools, but were at fi rst disappointed by their infl exibility and lack of sophistication. Then we discovered Neolane.”

“Neolane was the only platform to meet our needs on functionality and scalability and it offers impressive one-to-one personalization capabilities rather than just simple segmentation,” said Warwick. “Neolane is highly confi gurable and while very sophisticated, it’s user friendly for marketers.”

For Abcam, there was also its data management policy to consider. The company maintains a central database offering a high quality and very detailed single customer view serving multiple enterprise applications. Abcam wanted its marketing automation solution to draw upon that existing data source for advanced segmentation of its customer base.

“We found that most marketing automation tools mandate use of their own proprietary datamart, which would have meant undertaking a complex integration exercise,” said Warwick. “Neolane offered us the freedom to couple directly with our existing customer database, saving considerable expense and the potential risks of data integration.”

Neolane, Inc.One Gateway Center - 7th Floor300-334 Washington StreetNewton, MA 02458

Offi ce: +1 617 467 6760Fax: +1 617 467 6701

info@neolane.comwww.neolane.com

United States

United Kingdom

France

Scandinavia

Neolane and the Neolane logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Neolane Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

© 2011 Neolane, Inc.

“The accessibility and ease-of-use of campaign reports has enabled us to analyze overall campaign performance and trends guiding continual improvement. We’ve also used it to test the effect on deliverability and reactivity of using different variables for the same email.”

Phased implementationImplementation was phased over twelve months starting with the UK and progressing across the company’s worldwide operations. Abcam engaged Neolane Professional Services to help optimize more complex processes such as automated one-to-one content personalized product updates. Abcam also committed to develop a senior eCommerce employee skilled in campaign process design towards becoming a ‘Neolane super-user’ entrusted with building workfl ows and supporting the team.

Campaign optimizationCaptured as workfl ow elements, Abcam’s marketers can now simply build a performance-optimized, one-to-one campaign by selecting the relevant workfl ow items. No input from IT is required.

“We now have a central point of control over campaigns,” said Warwick. “Neolane enables us to defi ne, capture and enforce best-practice process workfl ows including for proper proofi ng and authorizations.“

All of Abcam’s campaigns now run on Neolane including:

• Automated one-to-one personalized product updates to enable customers to keep-up with products that are relevant to their research

• Research fi eld updates: 20-25 different newsletters per month, with personalized, relevant news and offers

• Monthly regional updates

• Specifi c promotions targeted to key accounts

• Event-triggered messages: e.g. new customer welcomes and purchase follow-ups

• Event invites: Abcam seminar and conference alerts to the specifi c customers that would fi nd them relevant

At Abcam, high-level personalization variables include the individual’s discipline, specifi c area of expertise and their geography. Abcam’s international offi ces and audiences are supported by ten language options and refl ect cultural preferences. Much fi ner personalization is achieved through analysis of each customer’s click-throughs and purchases.

Considered essential by Abcam, campaign reporting is another Neolane strength.

“The accessibility and ease-of-use of campaign reports has enabled us to analyze overall campaign performance and trends guiding continual improvement,” said Warwick. “We’ve also used it to test the effect on deliverability and reactivity of using different variables for the same email.”

Exciting benefi tsAbcam is enjoying many benefi ts from its Neolane investment:

• Email deliverability rates typically exceed 96 percent. Abcam’s deliverability rates with several very large organizations employing thousands of customer contacts are up by 400 percent through using a technique known as ‘throttling’ to control the number of emails sent hourly to any one domain name.

• Improved targeting and one-to-one personalization of subject titles and content, and better formatting is also stimulating campaign opening rates of 18.4 percent . Click-through rates now average 3.6 percent.

• The manual input to prepare one-off campaigns such as the regional, product and research fi eld updates has fallen by some 35 percent. While it took perhaps 3 hours to create a campaign before, it takes around 2 hours now; saving 48 staff days per year.

In the near future, Abcam will improve marketing return on investment further. For example, fi ner personalization and ‘next-best-offer’ features will be enabled by utilizing further degrees of intelligence gleaned from very recent interactions. More event-triggered campaigns will be run too, linked to interaction behavior.

Warwick concluded: “We are confi dent that with Neolane we can continue to improve the quality of our customer marketing campaigns, supporting our continued growth.”