Songbird Hearing
The Challenge
Sarnoff engaged Bridgeline to assist in the development of a strong, easy to understand experience for their online customers - one that would augment the company’s Direct Response Television (DRTV) advertising and make Sarnoff’s overall marketing spend more effective. They also desired a web experience management (WEM) strategy that would enable them to easily execute and track targeted interactive campaigns, regardless of technical user skills.
The Objectives
Bridgeline proposed a solution to distribute the benefits of the Songbird hearing technology to targeted audiences in various age and income levels. Leveraging an iAPPS Content Manager, iAPPS Commerce and iAPPS Marketier solution, Songbird would be able to use iAPPS content management capabilities to deliver a relevant shopping experience to their customers that was strong enough to result in long-term customer relationships.
On top of iAPPS’ industry leading unified functionality, Bridgeline’s award-winning user-centered design approach would support customized user processes, while iAPPS’ architecture would offer easy access to content, regardless of the user’s technical proficiency.
The Solution
Bridgeline trained Songbird users to use iAPPS to create targeted, multichannel marketing campaigns and to track them through its unified interface. The process was then customized to serve different homepages to different visitors based on how they accessed the Songbird site. This targeting and display process takes place entirely within the Songbird website – rather than in additional microsites, as is common in the industry – while it collects valuable metrics specific to each campaign.
The new website also offers shoppers an enhanced “trial offer” tactic, similar to one that Songbird has long taken advantage of in direct marketing. When a shopper chooses to purchase a trial offer online, customized messaging appears that promotes a special “Pay now” option, which carries a significant discount. Once they checkout, since the discount has already been activated, there is no need for customers to enter any additional discount codes during the process.
iAPPS Marketier also makes it easy to execute targeted email marketing campaigns to customers based on both visitor purchases and history. Marketier’s integration enables Songbird to easily assemble campaign lists based on purchases, as well as data around content a customer may have accessed on the site, which can indicate future buying intent.
Additionally, iAPPS’ special campaign-specific offers using customized URLs enhance marketing campaigns. Each time a user clicks a customized URL, they land on a product page that offers special discounted pricing for ONLY those visitors. This allows Songbird to target the experience - without cumbersome promotional codes - and to track the success of specific campaigns.
Finally, to consistently improve visitor experience, Songbird uses iAPPS’ forms building capability to provide a relevant exit survey. The short questionnaire assesses customer opinions about the shopping experience which is looped back into additional development cycles, in order to make sure that their customers’ expectations are met.
The Results
Since implementing the iAPPS solution at Songbird the consistent customer experience is much easier to maintain. According to Jennifer Haus, Vice President of Marketing, their previous site “… was housed with our fulfillment company. It was a cost-saving measure, but you couldn’t manage the site on your own – it had very limited functionality – you couldn’t add multiple items to the [shopping] cart.”
The previous site acted more like a microsite than a complete e-commerce detination, with limitations that prevented Songbird from achieving the success they needed to get to the next level in results. Still, being a smaller organization, it was important that the new site was easy to access and use.
“As a small company, it’s important to us because – you’re looking at the person who pretty much manages everything on a day-to-day basis,” Haus added. “And I’ve found in talking to a lot of people in the industry – e-commerce is big business, websites are big business, but a lot of companies … don’t put the staff behind it, because it isn’t their main income source.”
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re small, medium or large – [iAPPS] has everything we needed,” she pointed out, “from robust commerce, to easy-to-use CMS, to integrated tools like email capability – which was one of the things that really set it apart from a lot of the other options that are out there.”
Songbird’s internal users were put directly in control of their site and could manage content themselves with minimal training. There were people from all over the organization that needed to be able to use the CMS regularly, “… and it’s not always easy to train those types of people to use tools like that – but with the iAPPS solution it was very easy, and they were able to get up to speed,” said Haus.
She also found the platform easy to adapt to internal procedures and preferences. “[iAPPS is] also very dynamic and very customizable,” she said, “which is very important in whatever you’re looking for … in a CMS, in an email campaign management tool…. It needs to be easy to use, but robust in what it delivers.” The organization’s previous email marketing procedures were complex, involved 3rd party vendors, extra procedures and an overall lack of control. “Marketier does it all for us. It’s all housed right in our iAPPS tool in a very easy to navigate dashboard…,” added Haus.