The TAS Group's York Baur and Jane Morrin on Optimizing SaaS E-mail Marketing Tools for Increased Leads
October 21, 2009 By Heather Fletcher, Senior Editor, Target Marketing
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It's entirely possible that representatives of The TAS Group, the sales performance automation software provider headquartered in Seattle, asked themselves some of the same questions they advise customers to pursue before seizing an opportunity. After all, when the B-to-B company switched e-mail platforms recently, the solution it chose did seem to positively match all of its trademarked sales methodology questions.
So, at the end of 2008, TAS Group decided that using Genius Pro from San Mateo, Calif.-based Genius.com, a software-as-a-service e-mail marketing and marketing automation provider, was a good idea. The solution provides real-time e-mail performance and Web site interaction data that's accessible to a sales team and has a user-friendly interface that sealed the deal for York Baur, TAS Group's chief marketing officer. Since then, TAS Group brought its e-mail deliverability rates up to nearly 100 percent and doubled the number of qualified leads being forwarded to sales.
Jane Morrin, a TAS Group marketing executive who handles the firm's e-mail marketing campaigns and its e-mail platform provider, says deliverability rates had been below the industry average before making the switch.
Target Marketing: What was TAS Group's direct marketing objective when deciding to replace its e-mail marketing platform?
York Baur: E-mail marketing is one of the crucial demand generation vehicles that we use. It's not the only one, but it's certainly a crucial one and currently the largest one. So our objective in working with Genius was to really do a couple things. One is to improve both the deliverability and the responsiveness that we could provide to the e-mail campaigns that we have. And second, it was the ability to put a tool in the hands of salespeople, in addition to the air cover marketing that we do within the marketing department, to provide a tool that would allow salespeople to build and run and manage and respond to their own campaigns in an easy-to-use way. ... [The marketing department deploys] very large sends to our database. We do segment it ... But we're doing very large sends trying to find demand that exists out there. Whereas what the salespeople are doing is very small, very targeted sends, often either to a given account or maybe an industry subsegment that they're very familiar with and that has a very targeted message. So it's a one-two punch approach that we've taken.
So, at the end of 2008, TAS Group decided that using Genius Pro from San Mateo, Calif.-based Genius.com, a software-as-a-service e-mail marketing and marketing automation provider, was a good idea. The solution provides real-time e-mail performance and Web site interaction data that's accessible to a sales team and has a user-friendly interface that sealed the deal for York Baur, TAS Group's chief marketing officer. Since then, TAS Group brought its e-mail deliverability rates up to nearly 100 percent and doubled the number of qualified leads being forwarded to sales.
Jane Morrin, a TAS Group marketing executive who handles the firm's e-mail marketing campaigns and its e-mail platform provider, says deliverability rates had been below the industry average before making the switch.
Target Marketing: What was TAS Group's direct marketing objective when deciding to replace its e-mail marketing platform?
York Baur: E-mail marketing is one of the crucial demand generation vehicles that we use. It's not the only one, but it's certainly a crucial one and currently the largest one. So our objective in working with Genius was to really do a couple things. One is to improve both the deliverability and the responsiveness that we could provide to the e-mail campaigns that we have. And second, it was the ability to put a tool in the hands of salespeople, in addition to the air cover marketing that we do within the marketing department, to provide a tool that would allow salespeople to build and run and manage and respond to their own campaigns in an easy-to-use way. ... [The marketing department deploys] very large sends to our database. We do segment it ... But we're doing very large sends trying to find demand that exists out there. Whereas what the salespeople are doing is very small, very targeted sends, often either to a given account or maybe an industry subsegment that they're very familiar with and that has a very targeted message. So it's a one-two punch approach that we've taken.
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