As email marketers we are trained to send out our campaigns, wade thru the resulting analytics and mine the data for potential leads for our sales team. They, in-turn, follow up the hot leads via email or phone to create a more intimate conversation that ultimately can generate a sale. All this takes time. And the market place doesn’t wait.

Sales managers want their team armed with the tools to close the sale in the field. They need real-time analytics. Horizon Foods illustrates this point perfectly with their latest email campaign.

Imagine this. Hundreds of Horizon Foods distributors leave their offices each morning and scour their respective territories for families that need to get healthy, quick and easy meals delivered to their doors. The key here is “delivered to their doors.” As you can imagine, there is a lot of driving and door knocking going on to get a sale. There might be a solution!

A Clever Email Campaign and Simple Giveaway Helps Horizon Foods Distributors Open Doors

Working with Horizon, we designed an email campaign that was sent to thousands of their customers offering a free bag of shrimp with any order and a recipe or two to tickle their taste buds.

Anyone clicking on the Order Now button gets a friendly message from their distributor (driver) promising to stop by with their free delivery of shrimp. Remember, these are existing clients with a prior relationship with the distributor. Since this is a live encounter, the distributor has the opportunity to show the client other enticing meals and increase the value of the order.

The key to success is timing. Client saw the shrimp, clicked the button and is now ready to buy and cook. We need to get that data to the driver so he can make his rounds. This takes click-through to a whole new level we call “drive-through!” 😉

Email Report Generator Spits Out Daily, Real-Time, Actionable Data

In order to facilitate this real-time analytics, the Report Generator was used to customize our analytics dashboard to parse the data of those who clicked on the order link, sort them by head office/distributor and add in all the contact info including address and phone number. Each office will get this automated message every morning and be able to hand out the leads to each distributor before they make their rounds.

With thousands of orders on the line, this real-time data can tweak the sales trends by a percent or two, making a significant difference to Horizon’s bottom line.

Of course, we see ways of making this way more sophisticated. Imagine that each driver distributor is armed with an iPad and we stream the leads to him in real-time. Or even more interesting, we create algorithms that can predict with more certainty the buying patterns of clients based on past behavior. We can then score the leads based on opens, past purchases and other variables and offer the distributor prospects that today maybe falling thru the cracks.

This is just a taste of things to come… stay tuned to updates on this campaign and imagine what your sales team can do with real-time data. And tell us, are you using email analytics now to customize your marketing strategy?