Leupold Growth Strategy Adds Over 1 Million Marketable Contacts
The Overview
In 2019 Leupold, a US optics brand that is more than 100 years old, wanted to get closer to their own customers while growing their database significantly. The email and SMS channels were more easily personalized than traditional advertising and the marketing team knew this was the path to a better relationship marketing strategy. Audience Approach was enlisted to help develop the growth plan and provide the needed technology and services to meet the goal of attaining 1 million marketable contacts.
The Challenge
Leupold lacked a scalable acquisition strategy or a robust CRM to manage and message their audience. They also needed help determining which zero-party data they needed from their audience to convert more sales and build brand loyalty. A new CRM and structured data map needed to be established to then activate personalized campaigns across email and sms. Once rolled out, an ‘always-on’ acquisition plan needed to be developed and rolled out to the public market.
The Brief
Audience Approach had been working with several outdoor brands before engaging Leupold and understood the difficult task of balancing support to drive sales in big box and independent dealerships while still aiming to launch a brand owned e-commerce platform. In order to successfully support both channels, building a database of marketable contacts was critical. But furthermore, understanding the wants and needs of each contact at an individual level was the secret sauce. This approach afforded Leupold the ability to gain market research, understand which brands they needed to displace with the perfect product match and personalized offers into the right channel at an individual level.
The Solution
Audience Approach determined that Active Campaign was the CRM that best suited their needs moving forward. After a short in-person session at Leupold HQ, the top 10 most desired consumer data points were identified with dozens of ancillary info being labeled as ‘nice to have’. A detailed data classification map was created with a robust series of tags and automations that would allow hyper-personalized and dynamic content delivery. With a CRM in place, a recurring monthly sweepstakes was launched to their existing contact list asking 10 questions as part of the entry process. This expanded into dozens of other seasonal and regional sweeps with key brand partners.
Browse Some Promo Materials
The Results
In the first 45 days of our engagement, Audience Approach delivered over 30,000 consumer submissions with over 150,000 psychographic data points resulting in over $60k in measured sales from a personalized email offer.
Over a 4 year period we ultimately surpassed 1 million new contacts opted in while identifying and collecting over 100 critical data points such as the most common optic products owned, the activities they participate in, when their next optics purchase would be as well as a breakdown of which competing brands their audience owned.
Personalized emails hover at 60% open rate averages with click averages as high as 30%. The deep integration with Active Campaign CRM and Leupold’s e-commerce launch in 2020 has measured a significant lift in new revenue from the email channel across all products.
"Leupold's vision was simple, yet ambitious. Through an always-on acquisition strategy they were able to achieve their goal of over 1 million net new contacts and successfully launch their e-commerce platform at the right time based on data gleaned from consumers. Balancing revenue channels is a tricky business in the outdoor space and they navigated it perfectly."
Tim Glomb - Founder Audience Sherpa & Audience Approach
The Insights
Over this 4 year span, Audience Approach launched dozens of sweepstakes, automated hundreds of personalized email campaigns and provided crucial market research and business intelligence reports informing their go to market strategies.
They learned exactly which competing brand was their biggest threat in each of their product categories. They also learned which products consumers needed, when they planned to purchase, where they would purchase and which product qualities mattered most... all at an individual level. This constant flow of consumer information informed product marketing and go to market planning on a monthly basis.
Once the playbook had been built, rolled out and validated, Audience Approach was able to help Leupold hire long term skilled staff to transition core competencies of our strategy in house and reduce their marketing budgets while continuing to execute personalized marketing at a level not yet seen by any other outdoor optics brand.