French B2B Start-up CFAST Achieves 64% Open Rate with Automated Email Campaigns

Raising brand awareness in a niche B2B sector

CFAST sells tailored software solutions to alternative telecommunications operators. The Marketing Manager, Paul-Antoine Gerbay, joined the 10-person team back in 2016 and he immediately focused on creating an effective marketing strategy to attract the niche B2B sector they serve. 

“To reach our target group we have come up with a very comprehensive digital strategy. We do outbound marketing, particularly calls, but also inbound campaigns to attract leads and visitors through valuable content, and to position the company and our brand online. For example, we are setting up publications from major players on our blog (Bouygues Telecom, Centile, Jaguar Network, Adista, Open IP and more to come),” explains Paul-Antoine. 

However, Paul-Antoine knew that to raise brand awareness in this B2B sector, he needed to work with a special type of communication and very specific channels. “We’re not selling directly on the internet, like B2C e-commerce. So we need a different style of communication and a different action plan,” he adds.

The right solution to track KPIs more efficiently

As an experienced marketer, Paul-Antoine was well aware of the challenges CFAST would face in its market. The company handles an extended and complex sales cycle specific to this industry. For this reason, Paul-Antoine knew he needed a reliable platform to implement the company’s marketing strategy. “Choosing a software like ours has a huge impact on our customers’ information systems,” explains the Marketing Manager.

In addition, the company also needed a solution to more efficiently track their KPIs. The team was already publishing high quality content on their website as PDF, which became popular amongst their audience. But they didn’t have the right solution to capture the information from leads visiting their website to later initiate the nurturing process. To ensure success, Paul-Antoine needed a more effective sales funnel and a better overview of the leads’ interests and activities on the website.

Having worked in the past with other email marketing platforms, Paul-Antoine was aware he needed a solution other than the ones he had already used. The Marketing Manager wanted a powerful email and marketing automation tool to overcome the challenges he was facing with lead nurturing. 

After consideration, he decided to try Brevo since the platform was user-friendly and intuitive. “With Brevo I can easily manage and track email campaigns. With this information, it is much easier for me to understand our leads’ level of interest, and how I can sustain it,” explains Paul-Antoine.

Leveraging the power of marketing automation and audience segmentation

Initially using the platform for both newsletter sending and marketing automation, Paul-Antoine soon realized the latter feature was particularly efficient. For this reason, he centered his entire marketing strategy on automation. He started by implementing Brevo forms as the entry point for the automation workflows, which helped a lot with his nurturing and retention efforts. 

As part of the extended lead-nurturing process, a key step is communicating their expertise with potential clients. “Our audience doesn’t necessarily need a lot of content, but they do want high-quality content. For us, it is crucial to establish a long-term relationship with our leads to convince them of the quality of our services,” adds Paul-Antoine.

With the automation feature, the team at CFAST is now able to tailor their communications to each one of their segments “We have set up different automation workflows. For example, after someone visits our site and downloads our content, this lead will receive a series of marketing emails with offers and valuable information related to the document they’ve downloaded,” explains the Marketing Manager.

Paul-Antoine can now follow the progress of leads and monitor important metrics in the customer journey, such as which emails they’ve read or the website pages they’ve visited. “Every lead goes into a different journey. Depending on their activity each will receive a different set of emails. With the information from the workflows, we can decide if we wait for the lead to contact us or chase them further. We can also see if they have unsubscribed, for example. Now we can track closer what the prospect wants.” 

Standing out with a fully automated marketing strategy

Serving a B2B niche, CFAST relies heavily on word-of-mouth to attract customers. Since he started using Brevo, Paul-Antoine has observed how using the platform has helped the company stand out on several levels, which has naturally brought them more business via positive references. “Being able to understand where a particular lead is in the sales funnel and tracking their level of interest has been incredibly helpful to tailor the journey much more accurately,” he says. 

The Marketing Manager comments on how the form feature has been crucial to improving retention; “Since we’ve set up forms, we can capture visitor’s information, we have seen a highly positive impact on retention and loyalty. That’s why we’ve refocused our marketing strategy on that!”  

Having unlocked the power of automation, Paul-Antoine reports that now he has at least 9 active workflows. These scenarios leverage the data from each lead and their reactivity to the campaigns in order to tailor communications even further. “We have achieved an open rate of automated emails as high as 64%,” exclaims the Marketing Manager.

He also explains how pivoting their marketing strategy to a fully automated one has cleared the way to explore and test new ideas. “This solution has made it possible for us to create new marketing projects. Now we’re focused on developing new sources of content, for example, we will launch the publication of our first major study soon. I plan on testing and managing all of these resources with both the automation and forms features in Brevo,”  concludes Paul-Antoine.