The 2015 CRM Market Elite: 3 Day Blinds

THE CHALLENGE

To 3 Day Blinds, anyone with a window in his home is "an ideal customer," but landing actual conversions from such a vast pool of potential leads is no easy feat, says Dan Williams, chief revenue officer at 3 Day Blinds. Marketers at 3 Day Blinds are tasked with setting up phone appointments for its sales team after analyzing digital channels to find interested parties. But as the business grew, the team quickly realized that their marketing efforts had to evolve.

"We didn't just want to stand out there with a catcher's mitt, hoping that customers would come to us. We wanted to build our audience but be more sophisticated about the people we're trying to engage," Williams says.

To expand 3 Day Blinds' reach and sharpen its strategy, the marketing team wanted to deploy several digital demand generation campaigns that relied on pay-per-click advertisements and other traditional approaches across multiple channels, but the cost of achieving those goals without a targeting tactic was prohibitive. The company needed a more data-driven approach.

THE SOLUTION

In February 2015, 3 Day Blinds launched a joint marketing-advertising deployment with that approach in mind. Through a unique partnership between marketing automation provider Marketo and automated ad-buying platform Turn, 3 Day Blinds was able to identify relevant and specific audience segments and target them with ads.

"A marriage between ad tech and mar tech is the future," says Steve Sloan, senior vice president of partnerships and product strategy at Marketo. An ad tech company such as Turn can provide reach, but reach alone is not enough to boost conversion, he explains. "Companies can't afford to just serve a massive number of ads and hope for the best. They have to identify the audience groups most likely to convert. That's why 3 Day Blinds needed Marketo. We were able to determine those highly valuable segments and give them a more specific group to focus on with their advertisements," he says.

Furthermore, adding a marketing automation backbone to 3 Day Blinds' advertising effort gave the company better insight into the specific pieces of content that were driving results. "On a typical ad campaign, marketers can measure click-through rate and open rate, but with marketing technology, there's also the ability to tie it back to a piece of content and measure which campaign, which program, and which channel generated a sale," Sloan adds.

In 3 Day Blinds' case, identifying key audience segments required Marketo’s Munchkin technology for lead tracking, which works similarly to a first-party cookie. 3 Day Blinds placed the Munckin code on its Web assets, including informational pages and online forms, to collect data on consumers' digital behavior. "For example, if a consumer filled out a request for more information and proceeded to search for information on wooden blinds, that helped us determine what type of content that customer is most interested in,” Williams explains. Using the information that Munchkin collected, 3 Day Blinds' marketing team was able to create rich profiles of individual shoppers and eventually segment people who were likely to convert based on their digital behaviors. Those segments were then used to inform the brand's ad-buying strategy.

By combining the extent of Turn's ad-buying platform and the segment specificity delivered by Marketo's technology, 3 Day Blinds significantly expanded its reach without putting a massive strain on its budget. In just a few months, 3 Day Blinds saw a 140 percent increase in click-through rates and an 850 percent increase in leads per click. The company also grew its appointments per lead by 140 percent and cut acquisition costs by 80 percent.

Looking ahead, Williams says 3 Day Blinds plans to continue working with both Turn and Marketo to attract new customers to the brand. "We’'ve already achieved some great results, but the segments we can create are limitless," Williams says. "We're going to keep learning more about our customers and finding the best ways to reach them."

REAL RESULTS

• Click-through rates increased by 140 percent.
• Leads per click increased by 850 percent.
• Appointments per lead grew by 140 percent.
• Cost per acquisition fell by 80 percent.