Yes with a big smile on my face.

They delivered stellar results to iconic brands, such as Google, IBM, and Adobe, but their efforts were labor intensive. 

They wanted a marketing automation platform that enabled them to deliver email campaigns more efficiently, and with increased deliverability and scalability.

With the help of Act-On, they increased deliverability by 20%, eliminated 1,000 hours of manual labor annually, and are managing a database with more than 65 million contacts.

Having separate instances of Act-On for each of our clients lets us scale and leverage all the components of the platform to provide our clients best-of-class services.

Bret Smith

CEO

Challenge

High-Impact-Prospecting‘s early thinking was that it made sense to build its own platform, using its existing ISP relationships, hardware, and support personnel. Soon the agency found itself executing campaigns using a variety of local machines, multiple connections and applications, with attendant costs and time.

As one example, because H-I-P sends campaigns to its own database, the agency can track an abandoned form to a contact. To leverage this, H-I-P developed a remarketing strategy for abandoned forms which got great results…but was also time-intensive, tedious and inefficient. 

Our remarketing strategy increased outcomes by 18 percent – but the moving parts on our side required absolutely Herculean efforts,” said Managing Principal Bret Smith.

The agency needed a more time-efficient approach to email campaign delivery, with increased deliverability and a better reputation. The goals were to save time and labor, gain scalability to take on more projects, and increase value for clients.

Solution

After evaluating other marketing and email automation systems, Smith and his marketing team determined Act-On would best suit their needs. As a cloud-based solution versus a home-grown platform, the issues of hardware, time, technical support, and consulting were mitigated, lowering the total costs of ownership and reducing risk. 

In addition: Act-On’s usability and quick deployment meant that the team could be up and running quickly; its rich feature set would allow execution of sophisticated multi-touch campaigns. It took H-I-P less than two weeks to go from contract signing through initial training; the team was running multiple campaigns in a month. No assistance from the company’s IT department was required.

Results

For the remarketing campaign alone, an H-I-P employee had to spend hours manually crunching all the contacts from abandoned forms. Using Act-On, this step takes one click. Annually, the saved effort from this one program adds up to approximately 1,000 hours a year, about half the salary and benefits of a full-time employee.

In parallel, High-Impact-Prospecting also realized greater deliverability rates through leveraging Act-On’s platform, ISP relationships, and reputation — which meant a better return on the same campaign investment. 

H-I-P also appreciates the ability to segment responses in a way that allows a view right down to the email address, with just a click. This information is a factor in an evolving soft-bounce strategy.

Using the Act-On platform has given H-I-P the confidence to pursue new projects and take its business to the next stage. The agency recently signed a deal that will cost $330,000 to service. “We did that because we believe, using Act-On, we could achieve close to a 100 percent lift. That’s absolutely platinum.”

Being able to execute through Act-On, which in my personal experience is just crazy-easy to use, means not only can I say Yes to new clients, but I can say Yes with a big smile on my face.

Bret Smith

CEO

Signing up to be a part of Act-On’s APEX agency program has allowed us to leverage marketing automation, which increases our productivity and gives us more time to sign up new customers.

Bret Smith

CEO

Highlights

I can tell you that when we get a 20 percent lift in deliverability, it translates into 20 percent in additional revenue on the other end.

Bret Smith

CEO