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Growing
a B2B Business by Blending Traditional and Web Marketing Strategies
(Marketing Memo, February, 2004)
Clean.com
is a West Coast e-business that has figured out how to sell janitorial
supplies to commercial customers via the worldwide Web. Clean.com now
has 10,000+ customers, and it adds another 500-600 per month. Nearly
75% of the customers it acquired in 2001 continue to order products
from the company. Revenues now increase about 30%-40% per year. The
company was profitable for each of the last four months of 2003. Clean.com
seems to have survived the economic downturn by making sound operational
and marketing decisions.
Clean.com
operates in a mature niche served for the most part by traditional channels.
Competitors' salespeople call on companies much as their predecessors
did 50 years ago. This traditional channel handles most of the sales
of janitorial supplies to businesses. To shape its Web strategy, the
company has used surveys to obtain feedback from customers. Survey findings
led the company to offer more environmentally friendly cleaning agents
and to bring warehousing inside to improve service. Initially, a third
party handled warehousing and shipping. Clean.com has also experimented
with its marketing mix since its founding in the late nineties.
A
New Marketing Mix
Clean.com
had been using fax broadcasts and email messages to stay in touch with
customers and encourage repeat purchases. But, the company has modified
its fax and email campaigns, both because of CAN-SPAM legislation and
because Web marketing is more effective than sending faxes. While the
company continues to use email campaigns, it has had to add more opt-in
features. The company has also sought ways to prevent Internet Service
Providers (ISPs) from treating Clean.com's email messages as spam. Clean.com
has learned through trial and error what works and what does not work
in the new economy.
Clean.com's
Best Practices
Clean.com's
techniques may be applicable to your business:
- Use
telemarketing and email to follow up with customers, but abide by
CAN-SPAM laws. Clean.com's email "click through rate" (percentage
of emails opened) is above average.
- Use
Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Embed the right key words and meta-tags
on your Web site to ensure that your company's links rise to the top
when a prospect searches for your product- or service- category on
Google, Overture, or business.com. Clean.com finds it more cost-effective
to use an outside company to handle optimization than to add to head
count.
- Regularly,
monitor your company's position on Google, as well as your competitors'
position.
- Measure
the impact of traditional and Web marketing, and modify initiatives
accordingly.
Winett
Associates can help you gain valuable insight from existing customers
and prospects.
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