When it comes to marketing automation, most companies tend to stick with the basics: CRM sync, sales alerts, and basic email campaigns. With Marketo, this is similar to buying a Ferrari to drive on Sundays around the block.
As a Marketo consultancy, there’s nothing better than developing projects with clients who see the full potential of marketing automation and want to extract the absolute best. This is the case of News Corp Australia.
Currently, News Corp Australia uses Hoosh’s 2-SMS solution to create and manage SMS campaigns from Marketo. News Corp is setting a great example of how to apply marketing automation to their specific business needs. With Hoosh’s SMS, they were able to obtain operational gains and provide an excellent experience for their stakeholders.
Challenges
News Corp used Marketo to drive their extensive advertisement sales, which included a custom built SMS solution to send notifications to alert their customers regarding classified ads renewals.
Multiple publications had different deadlines throughout the week, which required a dynamic and instant communication stream with merchants.
Weekly SMS alerts were sent regarding:
- Publication deadlines for ad bookings that had not been completed (cart abandonment)
- Ad booking confirmations
- Booking expiration details
SMS proved to be an effective channel; however, the process of setting up campaigns was extremely complex and time consuming for the marketing team. Some challenges experienced:
- It took an average 4 to 6 hours to build each campaign every week
- Campaigns were not flexible and did not allow customization
- Unreliable deliverability rates
- Lack of metrics reporting and tracking
- Lack of interface integration with Marketo
- Experienced difficulty setting up new SMS Campaigns and create integrated programs in Marketo
Solutions
News Corp selected Hoosh’s 2-Way SMS solution to create and manage all of their SMS campaigns directly from Marketo.
Pre-built SMS programs were also added to the most common cases, which allowed Campaign Creation a sense of ease and efficient speed through Marketo. When it came to reoccurring campaigns, all the marketing team base programs and rewrite or change the content in the text messages.
As Hoosh 2-Way SMS supported all gateway providers, News Corp shifted from Twilio to Oxygen8. This move significantly reduced their cost for every SMS sent.
Since Marketo has the ability to handle high volume SMS, News Corp were able to increase the number of Campaign Creations, while expanding the use of SMS in other business sectors.
Currently, they send out approximately 1,600 and 2,000 SMS messages every month, not just for classified ads, but also events reminders, registrations, and check-ins.
Benefits
News Corp saw impressive results that turned into the following benefits:
- SMS proved to be 7x more effective than emails
- Reduced SMS campaigns deployment time from 4 to 6 hours to 10 to 30 minutes
- Ability to process high volume SMS through Marketo
- Simple deployment of new campaigns using Pre-built Programs
- Automated data and subscription management via the SMS Centre
- Comprehensive reporting to prove effectiveness
- ROI to the business
- Ability to save up to 40% of SMS costs due to the flexibility of switching gateway providers
- Flexibility to expand SMS to other business areas, event reminders, registrations, and check-ins
Overall, News Corp’s use of SMS for events was very successful. On the day of the event, they sent SMS reminders with the event details and URL link with directions:
An hour before the event started, they allowed registrants to check-in via SMS. This added feature gave registrants the choice to avoid queues and obtain a personalised experience for all attendees:
At News Corp Australia’s COME TOGETHER 2016 event, 62% of check-ins were completed via SMS and 43% had checked-in before the event registration started.
Fab Capodicasa, Hoosh’s founder and MD, and Greg Beazley, head of Marketing Automation at News Corp Australia had recently presented a Marketo webinar about this particular case study. Watch the webinar recording here.