Outbound marketing drives sales — and Lifetime Value
Improving Results. A Case Study:
Growing Market Share, Revenue and Lifelong Customers
The Client:
A petroleum and heating oil supplier looking to expand its presence and customer base in the North East for their home heating oil deliveries. Much like other utility customers, home heating customers remain customers for approximately 10 years before looking around at the alternative supplier options.
The Opportunity:
Known primarily a regional gas station brand, this leading oil distributor was looking to retain their current residential heating oil customers, while growing their customer base for new heating oil deliveries. However, cross-sell opportunities were proving difficult – being a gas station customer didn’t always transfer to being a customer for your home heating oil. It was time to lay the groundwork for greater awareness.
The Assignment:
Secure the current customer base at the end of the Winter heating season and help reduce possible attrition through Spring and Summer. Capture new sales from competitors and promote cross-sell opportunities with the gas stations and C-stores [convenience stores] – building not only awareness, but brand loyalty and customer longevity.
The Campaign:
- Working with the client’s promotions agency, develop an aggressive and exciting cohesive “Favors for neighbors” cross channel marketing campaign – including TV, radio, a campaign-specific website and newspaper ads – targeted direct mail, in-store brochure/applications and all in-store POS advertising.
- The campaign kicked off with direct mail to approximately 50,000 existing automatic delivery customers via a multi-panel brochure, letter and activated discount card. A week later: TV/Radio, geographically-restricted prospect direct mail and in-store marketing reinforced our client’s USP and created greater awareness.
The Results:
Following this more conceptual and cohesive multi-channel campaign approach to their marketing: brand awareness and new home delivery sales were up. Annual attrition was down. The client also saw a bump in their C-store [convenience store] sales.
The ROI:
Factoring in the typical lifecycle of a home heating oil customer, the client reported results of nearly 500:1* — a hot result in anyone’s book!