Glice Case Study – Email Marketing Automation Success

Vito M.
5 months ago
‘What was really cool to see was that the theoretical setup that we came up with, did actually translate into the very results we were hoping for, and even exceeded expectations… This worked super well and exactly the way we wanted it to. So that was great to see.’

Florian K.
Former Marketing Director
Glice

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) & Email Marketing Automation Success Story – Glice

Frictionless forms are vital to capturing as many qualified leads as possible. In this case study, we’ll demonstrate how we implemented streamlined webforms (via Jotform) for a client and doubled (2x) the amount of leads they captured (100% increase).

We’ll also explain how we transformed their customer journey by building a complex lead nurture strategy from scratch using ActiveCampaign and its powerful email automation builder.

The Client

Glice is a manufacturer and global leader of sustainable, ecological ice surfaces that don’t need water or electricity. The product is especially popular for winter sports like hockey and recreational ice skating. Based in Switzerland, Glice was founded in 2012 and employs 50+ team members throughout the world.

The Problem

Glice’s founder, Viktor Meier, approached Growth Geyser in December of 2020 distinctly searching for help in sales and marketing automation.

Despite conducting successful sales and marketing programs for many years, Glice felt it needed to begin to automate its sales and marketing processes in order to compete. The top problems Glice sought to solve for were the following:

Leveraging email marketing automation, specifically in order to better nurture and guide customers through the buying journey. Glice had only sent periodic and irregular newsletters in the past. Therefore Glice felt it had been leaving money on the table. In the words of Glice’s former Marketing Director, Florian K.:

‘What we didn’t have in place was automated email marketing. And so that is what we wanted to set up. That was the missed opportunity. To nurture. People who were not clients yet, who had visited the website who had filled out the contact–form… To nurture them with email sequences, and to turn them into more promising leads…’
Automated lead routing to the various regional sales representatives scattered across the globe. Glice had a distinct process in place to route leads, using a basic webform, Zapier, and Smartsheets in conjunction with each other. However, they were looking to further streamline this process.
Lead qualification was entirely manual. Glice believed it could better segment leads between hot & warm leads via a series of questions on its webform. In turn, this would allow sales representatives to devote more time toward ‘hotter’ more qualified leads.
Our team at Growth Geyser detected another problem. Glice webforms were complicated, one-page forms with approximately 15 fields. We felt strongly that streamlining the forms would increase conversions and the amount of leads captured.
Glice’s website is published in 16 languages. In addition, Glice wanted to divide its prospects and customers into 8 distinct marketing segments. Therefore the solution was going to require many permutations.
Lastly, Glice had no CRM or marketing automation software in place. The only software they had used to organize leads in the past was Smartsheets. Therefore, it was looking for a robust upgrade.

The Solution

The marketing automation software Glice chose was ActiveCampaign. The webform solution that it chose was Jotform. ActiveCampaign provides a seamless, native integration with Jotform, making the pair an ideal solution to handle the job.

The first order of business was to redesign the webform. The old form had approximately 15 fields, many of which were required fields. We identified this problem as a possible ‘quick win’ for the Glice team. Since English is the primary language of the site (50%+ of organic traffic), we started with it.

We also needed to distinguish ‘hot’ leads from ‘warm’ leads. Hence we created 2 paths for prospects via a radio button on the form: ‘Get Consultation’ or ‘Download Synthetic Ice Buyer’s’ guide. Get consultation typically indicated to the sales team that the prospect was in a buyer’s mood. Hence the lead was routed to the appropriate regional sales member, who would then have a chance to reach out to schedule a call.

So we reduced the amount of fields from 15 to 7. Here’s how the old form compared with the new:

Old Form: 15 fields, all 15 text fill in (substantial amount of typing required.

New Form: 6 fields (+2 conditional depending on several answers), 4 text fill in; 2 – 4 dropdown and / or radio button

So, based on the ‘Hot’ vs. ‘Warm’ path, the form submission triggered 2 distinct drip sequences. Each of the 2 drip sequences contained 3 – 5 emails spaced over approximately 10 days.

One of the questions (not seen above) on the form also determines the prospects vertical. There are 8 distinct verticals, which we used to segment Glice’s audience into 8 different buckets. Those buckets determined the messaging of the emails they received in the drip sequence.

Considering we would eventually have to write these emails in 16 languages, this presented a serious challenge:

8 distinct emails (5 for one sequence, 3 for the other)
With 8 variations in messaging (accounting for the 8 segments / verticals)
And In 16 languages

That’s an astounding quantity of email permutations: 8 x 8 x 16 = 1024 total permutations

Fortunately for us, ActiveCampaign has a powerful feature called Conditional Content Blocks. This allowed us to operate with a much smaller quantity of emails (8 x 16 = 128 permutations).

Though there was no way to get around the language obstacle, we were able to use conditional content blocks to show and hide small blocks of content depending on which of the 8 verticals to which the customer belonged.

We created an additional ‘lead routing’ automation for each form submission that performed the following:

Each contact was assigned to its corresponding language via a custom field
Each contact, depending on country of origin, was determined to be inside or outside of GDPR jurisdiction. Accordingly, they were only opted into email marketing if they specifically agreed to opt in.

The Results

The project produced a 100% increase in leads as a result of the re-designed webforms. We slowly introduced the new forms to every language, and the same results occurred across the board.

As mentioned earlier, we implemented 8 lead nurturing emails, which were then replicated across multiple different languages. Because we used Conditional Content Blocks, we were able to implement different messaging across 8 different verticals without having to create new emails for every vertical.

Growth Geyser advised Glice on emailing best practices, and as a result open rates and click rates were extremely high:

Journey 1: Open rates as high as 72%, click rates as high as 54%
Journey 2: Open rates as high as 52%, click rates as high as 21%

In addition:

Lead routing to sales members (based on geographical territory) improved.
Segmentation of leads into ‘Hot’ vs. ‘Warm’ buckets improved labor allocation to more highly qualified leads.
All journeys were created across multiple languages & multiple currencies

The Conclusion – A Happy Client

‘I thought it was great that you accommodated the idea, the concept that we started out with, but then along the way, also brought in your own perspective and gave us really solid advice on how to make it better. You helped us see what wouldn’t work or how to adapt our idea to a realistic, pragmatic setup that would actually work. Then we saw that come to life and translate into tangible results.’ – Florian K.

Growth Geyser helped Glice to choose and leverage powerful marketing automation tools to improve its customer journey and sales operations. It’s a prime example of how an already successful company can continue to improve by embracing technology.
Glice continues to grow and flourish as a result of these decisions today.