Challenge
Fastenal, the largest fastener distributor in the nation that owns and operates over 2,220 stores worldwide, was seeking a better way to directly connect with their customers and prospects. Their main challenges were twofold: Their current direct mail efforts were expensive and proved little success at a very high cost. As well, their online promotional flyer took weeks to create in house, often times resulting in missed deadlines. Being new to the online channel, they wanted a partner they could rely on.
Solution
After conducting a market comparison on several email marketing vendors, they once again selected Knowledge Marketing (KM) because of their unique online platform, great personal service and the price was spot on for the industry. In the beginning Fastenal’s main objective was to deliver their monthly sale promotion via opt in email campaigns. “We appreciate that anyone can use the online tools with a small amount of training. We thought we’d need to hire someone with an IT background to manage our email program but found out we could easily absorb the work with the existing staff. The three key features that really helped us out were the custom built templates, Email Wizard, and the Digital Editions.” said Kelly Foegen, Campaign Manager. After a successful year of delivering their promotional opt in emails, they expanded to include more frequent and targeted email campaigns based on audience preferences. These included campaigns such as monthly newsletters, monthly specials, racing updates from their www.fastenalracing.com subscribers, and pre/post tradeshow follow up campaigns. They also expanded to use additional tools on the KM platform such as the Digital Edition Wizard. This not only allows them to quickly post their online flyers but they obtain reporting metrics which they were not able to generate from their previous in-house method. These metrics include reporting activity by recipient such as pages viewed, click activity, pages printed, and referrals. “Digital Editions give our flyers a very professional appearance and are easy for any user to navigate.” says Foegen.
Results
With KM’s platform, you can see results immediately, said Foegen. “As the months go by we have seen an increase in our online sales directly related to our Digital Editions, which is very difficult to prove with more traditional marketing. We’ve been able to reduce our cost per contact by 6Xs resulting in just pennies per contact. With such success, we have also nearly eliminated our direct mail and focus solely on email. With Digital Editions, Fastenal’s web team has been able to reduce the time to market with their online flyers from 2 weeks to 1 to 3 days. Without a doubt, Knowledge Marketing was the right fit for us not only on cost but overall email marketing service and unlimited customer support.
