Scrutton Bland gets to know its audience like never before

Challenge

Scrutton Bland had been using Dotdigital for just shy of a decade. But apart from creating and sending emails, they weren’t taking advantage of everything that the cross-channel marketing platform had to offer. Above all, the marketing team knew that they were missing out on opportunities to collect data on their clients behaviors and preferences. This meant that they weren’t able to leverage powerful marketing tools, like segmentation and automation, to personalize their communications and enrich their audience’s experiences. As a result, they saw low engagement rates on their campaigns, which remained static with each passing month.

Knowing that they could do so much more, Scrutton Bland partnered with StrategiQ, an integrated marketing agency, that offers a range of strategy, creative, website development and marketing services. As a Dotdigital certified partner, StrategiQ was able to provide advice and training that could help Scrutton Bland tap into the true potential of the platform.

“We knew that Dotdigital was so much more than an email sending platform, but we didn’t have the resources or time to leverage all of its offerings,” says Elizabeth O’Hanlon, Head of Marketing at Scrutton Bland. “So, we worked with StrategiQ to learn how we could effectively use it to better understand our audience, as well as become more strategic when it came to the communications we sent and when we delivered them.”

Solution

One of the first things that Scrutton Bland did was launch a series of new automated campaigns, including a welcome series and a re-engagement series.

Through these campaigns, they employed Dotdigital’s innovative offerings to gain a deeper understanding of their subscribers. Additionally, they used implicit profiling to see where they clicked in the emails, and added a preference center in the welcome series that enabled their audience to explicitly tell them the service and industry they are interested in. They also took advantage of Dotdigital’s web behavior tracking for good measure.

Armed with deeper insights, they were able to segment their audiences and deliver relevant and effective communications that were based on their marketing preferences, behaviors, and more. Additionally, Scrutton Bland leveraged Dotdigital’s integration hub, which provided a full picture of the touchpoints throughout their audience’s journey.

Along with Dotdigital’s advanced capabilities, Scrutton Bland appreciates the exceptional customer support that the team has provided over the years.

“Dotdigital has been fantastic with training our team,” says Elizabeth. “We didn’t have any of that with our old provider, so we’ve really welcomed their live chat and training support, especially if there’s a certain feature that we haven’t fully grasped. We know that if we ever have a question, we will get a fast answer from Dotdigital.”

In addition to their live chat feature, Elizabeth has appreciated Dotdigital’s online events that provide information on how to further take advantage of their offerings.

Results

By harnessing the power of analytics and segmentation, Scrutton Bland has been able to target their audience with more meaningful communications. To date, they have built approximately 7,000 customer profiles and reached around 2,790 website tracking records.

“Six months ago, we only had contact names and email addresses and a very limited understanding of who Scrutton Bland’s contacts were,” explains StrategiQ’s Email Marketing Specialist Lauren Oliver. “Today, we have gotten so granular with profiling that we can tell Scrutton Bland whether a certain person is a client or if they are self-employed — and how their communications should work based on that information. And we’ve managed to do all of this using Dotdigital and the tools within it.”

By sending more personalized communications to their audience, Scrutton Bland has seen a 24% uplift in open rates, a 36.5% increase in unique clicks, and a 62% jump in click-to-open rates from February to July 2021, compared to the same period in the prior year.

The team has also experienced an array of qualitative benefits, especially through the vast amount of time they have saved by using Dotdigital.

“The automations that StrategiQ has worked on have played a huge role in empowering our team to focus on the big picture, especially with the welcome series,” says Elizabeth. “Once they are set up, we’ll go in and tweak small things, but the bulk of the work is done. The email templates that we have saved are great, too.”

Looking ahead

As Scrutton Bland looks to the future, they plan to integrate their CRM data with Dotdigital to create even more powerful engagements. In addition, they are exploring Dotdigital’s Eventbrite integration, and evaluating how they can use it to automate the entire event process, from sign up all the way through post-event communications.

“The integration with Eventbrite is going to be so powerful for us moving forward,” says Elizabeth. “We host a lot of events at Scrutton Bland, so that will be brilliant.”

Client profiling will also continue to be a major focus for the team at Scrutton Bland. Their next step is to uncover deeper insights into their audience’s behaviors and preferences and take personalization to a whole new level.