Client: Tyndale House Publishers

Industry: Publishing

Services Provided:

• CRM Strategy
• Web Site Development
• Market Research
• Personalized E-mail Marketing

The Challenge
Tyndale House Publishing is the largest publisher of Christian books and curriculum in the United States. They wanted to understand their audience, and develop a grassroots campaign in which buying a family of products became an experience of the campaign rather than a single purchase. Thus creating a loyal, valuable customer database. This database could then be used to launch other campaigns at a grassroots level that would not follow the typical campaign cycle, but become an ongoing communication that facilitates ministry growth. Tyndale understood that there were both challenges and opportunities in trying to more accurately target its audience with relevant and timely communications. They partnered with Precision Dialogue to help develop that customer-focused strategy that utilizes the power of e-channels.

The Solution
Precision Dialogue developed an e-channel marketing program targeted to buyers of church-based curriculum as part of phase one of Tyndale's strategic CRM initiative. Our campaign is designed to meet the following objectives:

Garner permission and engage in personalized e-dialogues with leaders of 30,000 churches and small groups.

Drive sales by building momentum and energy around the first campaign (Beyond Belief Campaign). Secure 5,000 pre-sale orders before the campaign actually kicks off, and distribute 100,000 booklets.

Understand church buying patterns, needs and wants for future CRM and product development efforts Precision Dialogue partnered with Tyndale to develop an online community to facilitate the interactions among pastors, fellowship and youth groups, content providers and retail outlets. A real-time analysis tool was implemented to track registrants and non-registrants alike. This provided a customer understanding that resulted in actionable strategies and tactics. Therefore, we were able to change usability features and content to turn the browser into an active member.

The analysis tools also allowed us to segment our audiences, see how each segment was using the site and what marketing channels were providing the largest increase in our most valuable segment. This enabled us to determine which media was working the best and modify the campaign immediately. The content of the website, personalized emails, newsletters, call center scripts and PR tour were able to change on the fly according to these results.

These tools also gave us the ability to extend our reach even further by using our base audience profiles to develop more targeted campaigns through referrals. The analysis and tracking tools were essential in aiding us to exceed our goals.

Precision Dialogue also chose to use Microsoft's .NET software to design the website. .NET is the latest software from Microsoft that connects information, people, systems and devices through the use of XML Web services. From a technology perspective, .NET is an Internet-centric architecture and technology offering that defines how different applications, sources of data or devices can integrate with and share information with each other. This allows easier integration between applications that is particularly designed for use in an Internet infrastructure. Therefore, site updates and enhancements are much more cost effective and efficient. This also allows the site to have a much more efficient processing to serve up web pages, which equates to less webservers to handle the same amount of traffic. This equated to a savings of more than $100,000 in hardware alone.

The Result
The first product line campaign kicked off on September 4th 2002, with the launch of www.beyondbelief.com and a media tour by Josh McDowell for his latest book "Beyond Belief to Convictions." The site set the stage for the ministry message, providing background information, community involvement, and a campaign timeline that the audience can follow along with. We were able to capture valuable information about the users as they followed each step of the timeline, and gave valuable resources to help them in their ministry. The integrated marketing effort tied in the media tour, affiliate web site and publication advertising, co-branded personalized email marketing to 675,000 recipients, and permission based email marketing to users who registered on the beyond belief web site. The effects were overwhelming.

"It is truly exciting and humbling to be part of something that is generating this kind of a response!" said Jim Baird. "We had an original goal of reaching 30,000 churches by the Summer of 2003 and we met that goal by the second month." We had anticipated printing 50,000 booklets to distribute within the first year, and had delivered those within the first month. The refer-a-friend campaign was highly successful with a rate of 30% of people visiting www.beyondbelief.com, referring a friend to visit the site as well.

"Precision Dialogue is helping us understand how to maximize our most profitable customer segments and to track and refine each dialogue and interaction we have with them. In addition, they are helping us identify new customers based on the attributes of our most profitable relationships and introducing them to our products lines in a non-threatening and welcomed manner," said Ron Beers, Vice President of Tyndale House Publishing. "In turn, we expect to realize much greater ROI with our marketing dollars," Ron added. This first campaign has accumulated over 30,000 registered users on the site that we can communicate to on a monthly basis. This sets the stage for future campaign resources and developments based on their direction.

The next product line to be released by Tyndale is scheduled for the Fall of 2003.