Industry
Education
Challenge
SAM Labs' biggest challenge is ensuring educators clearly understand their products and where they fit into the school day while also maintaining a healthy, engaged database amidst outdated and unverified contacts.
Results
By identifying inactive contacts and cleaning the database, SAM Labs saw a 57% increase in highly engaged leads, driving more contacts down the funnel.
Key Product
Marketing Consulting
Being able to better target the people that we are messaging and communicating with is a great advantage.
About SamLabs
SAM Labs is transforming K-8 education by making computational thinking and 21st-century skills more accessible through STEAM and coding resources. Developed by educators and backed by research, these interactive tools provide scalable learning experiences for students and teachers. With user-friendly coding platforms and ready-to-use lesson plans, SAM Labs empowers educators to integrate STEAM seamlessly into classrooms, labs, and after-school programs.The Challenge
As many companies out there, one of the main challenges SAM Labs has, as Dylan Hendricks states, “is making sure our audience has a clear understanding of what our products do and the problem that they solve”. Getting the word out and making sure that educators know where they fit into their school day.
SAM Labs' message is greatly based on persona, so it’s important to make sure that the message is the correct one in the email campaigns and that SAM Labs knows who their audience is and how responsive these contacts will be.
Maintain a healthy database
“Are we marketing to the best possible people in the database”?
Again, like most marketers, Dylan wants to make sure that the efforts around email marketing are paying off.
Some of their contacts are not valid anymore. There is no cohesive agreement about where these contacts came from in the first place, and in addition to that, some sales reps are afraid to let them go. Exploring the possibility of re-engaging inactive contacts through targeted campaigns might be a viable strategy.
The Solution: Thousands of dollars saved by re-engaging inactive contacts
1. Persona-focused campaigns
SAM Labs has been working with Thalox since September 2022, ran 18 predictions so far, and usually runs a new one every week since they're sending out weekly emails. SAM Labs sends emails based on persona, mainly contacts in the US, and based on the job title they have. SAM Labs uses active lists with those criteria, plus the High Engagers and the Dormant Potential.
Result
The High Engagers had an increase of 57% from their very first campaign on September 22 to their highest peak so far in May 2023. The increase shows a high likelihood of contacts engaging in the future.
Dylan afirms "Within active lists, having those personas and segregating them even further with thalox, has been a great success.”
The dormant potential also experienced an interesting trend. There was a clear decrease after the first peak in December, and it was quite normalised until March. SAM Labs reached an impressive improvement of 420% since September 2022.
Image 1 - Example of an active list using the thalox engagement segments
Image 2 - Segments evolution across the predictions
1. No Activity
Thalox provides an extra segment, which is the No Activity. This is not based on our predictive score (TES), but it shows the number of contacts that have never been touched by email marketing activities before.
Result
It helped SAM Labs to clearly disqualify a significant number of contacts, which were deleted afterwards.
This was first discussed together with the marketing and sales teams, to further understand where these people fall into SAM labs' plan. The first thing SAM Labs needed to look at was if there was any sales activity in those contacts and the second was website activity for the last 2 years. In this case, there were contacts that had no activity matching those rules. This also had a major impact, in the range of thousands of dollars saved off SAM Labs' annual HubSpot Subscription bill.
Dylan says "There are a lot of people who hold on to this contacts, but if they did not respond to marketing communication and there is no activity with sales, we know they need to be deleted”.
By removing them from the database, SAM Labs can focus their efforts on the contacts that are more likely to convert or respond positively. This allows them to improve targeting and personalisation, tailoring the messages to the active and engaged audience, which can significantly increase their campaign effectiveness.
Image 3 - Data extract evolution for deletion of contacts
3. Inactive or Indecisive
SAM Labs used the Inactive or Indecisive to run a re-engagement campaign. It was a series of 5 emails sent over 2-1/2 weeks. The main goals of this specific campaign were:
- Re-engaging inactive contacts using researched strategies to move them further into more engaged segments
- Clean-up contacts
- A/B test in various email elements
Result
SAM Labs was able to delete around 7000 contacts and identify successful email elements during the A/B testing.
Also, during their campaign, SAM Labs was able to decrease the inactive or indecisive by 6,6% and increase the high engagers and dormant potential by 18,5% and 128%, respectively.
Image 4 - Result of re-engagement campaign on the Inactive or Indecisive
What’s next for SAM Labs?
Another challenge already mentioned before is that SAM Labs doesn't always know the original source of their older contacts. Thalox also provides a very comprehensive data insight table where they can see the fill rate of their properties. SAM Labs can use their first ever touchpoint to fill in that missing value.
Another thing is sending highly engaged leads to sales based on an actionable behavior: request a free trial, pricing, or a demo. Usually, they nurture them up to that point. SAM Labs has an MQL list with contacts that haven't done anything actionable yet. There is a huge opportunity to filter the high engagers out of that and nurture them up until they are ready for a sales outreach.
In their next campaigns, we want to see a significant improvement reflected in the click-through rate, as we've seen with other customers.
SAM Labs is great proof of our dedication to making our customers successful. We look forward to continuing to help SAM Labs exceed their goals and drive extraordinary outcomes with thalox.
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