Client Challenge

Sony decided to adopt marketing automation across the different product lines that they had.  Each product line previously worked in a silo and had their own creative agencies, email platforms and marketing teams.  The vision was to streamline this all and have all campaigns being executed using one technology agency and two creative agencies.

The different marketing teams did not like this approach so the CMO got rid of pretty much every single member of the entire marketing department.  He then recruited some heavy hitters on staff to wield these agencies and then build Sony marketing department 2.0.  A marketing department that was all about marketing automation.

They also wanted to harness the power of Eloqua to create lifecycle campaigns which would be fully automated of the back of an integration between Eloqua and SFDC.  This was an ambitious project which I have written up in my blog.  In the end it won the best lead nurture program in the Oracle Markie awards and was producing and additional, fully attributable to campaign, £1 Million per month.

Approach

Campaign execution was streamlined utilizing a ticketing system, not too dissimilar to the one that Pl8ypus agency are using.  It eliminated error with sends because all emails and deployment methods were standardized for Eloqua campaigns.  It also allowed for an audit trail allowing, at a glance, Sony to see the status of all their campaigns.

Development was very different.  There were two major initiatives.  One was a lifecycle campaign for videographers.  Videographers were business that purchased Sony video recording equipment.

Sony videographer lifecycle campaign

The lifecycle of a Sony video camera was set to two years.  This allowed for three distinct phases.

The first phase was getting started.  The getting started campaign was a series of emails that would be pointing their new customers to product information, showing them educations videos and getting them to sign up to the various user forums they might be interested in.

The second phase was mid lifecycle.  When contacts were in this phase they were generally sent the monthly newsletter.

Finally end lifecycle.  End lifecycle kicked in about three month before the two year point from when they purchased, which was also when their warranty would run out.  Contacts would get sent a series of communications about their product and what additional features the next generation product has, this putting Sony and the project at the forefront of the clients mind.

Sony PrimeSupport

The offshoot of the Sony videographer campaign was what if contacts did not purchase a new product?  The catch all for that was to automate emails getting sent out to allow clients to extend their Sony PrimeSupport warranty by another two years with the dealer that they originally bought from.

Impact

Campaign execution was streamlined, no email errors occurred with the efficient, robust system and processes that were put in place.  Sony had us do all their Eloqua campaign execution work.  These processes combined with a no nonsense rate card, a very favourable hourly rate and a 3 day SLA ensured that Sony had no problems at all with campaign execution.

The development projects generated serious amounts of revenue for Sony.  These pioneering projects were then rolled out on to Sony’s other product wings.