A client’s perspective

Read, in his words, how we helped David Field, UK Product Marketing Manager at Trend Control Systems, encourage his clients to embrace new technology with a minimum amount of fuss...

"Building Energy Management Systems monitor and control services such as heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, ensuring they operate at maximum levels of efficiency and economy. A topical subject in today's energy conscious world! We are one of the world's leading manufacturers of these systems – essentially we empower businesses to control and monitor their buildings' energy usage while providing a suitable working environment for all the people inside it.

We're talking to two key audiences – the building facility managers who choose the systems their businesses use and the actual engineers who install the system for them.
I briefed the Abstracts team to help us launch the IQView4, our new touch screen controller display. From a business perspective we aimed to encourage existing facilities managers to upgrade to the new technology while persuading our installers to choose the IQView4 instead of our existing products. To do this we wanted to promote the simplicity of the new display to these prospective customers.

There's nothing quite like proving how easy change can be by putting something tangible in customers’ hands…. Abstracts devised a clever online demo which literally showed how easy it was to use the new touch screen display by mimicking the operation of the real device. They published this at www.IQView4.com and encouraged facilities managers to go and see it in the PR. This has been received extremely well with some people saying it is the best piece of marketing Trend have ever done!

Abstracts also designed a nifty DM incorporating a polypropylene template for the new display. For me this was a way of encouraging my installers to take the first step towards change as they could use the template as a guide for fitting the new display. The template is held within a printed DM pack reflecting the design of the display and focusing on the easy touch screen.

This is backed up by a ReportMail campaign, on a new template which Abstracts had designed, to our customer base which greatly increased the open rates.

The success of the campaign has been demonstrated by the sales figures. Since the beginning of April when the IQView4 was launched, the sales of our existing small and medium displays have fallen by 50% with the IQView4 accounting for nearly 70% of these products, showing a rapid take-up and an increase in overall sales and revenue.

There's no doubt Abstracts is creative and, importantly, they are genuinely easy to work with. However within this the team doesn’t lose sight of commercial objectives which was particularly important to this campaign. I know I can rely on them to help support my business objectives, offer advice when I need it, suggest solutions when I ask…. often at the drop of a hat and that’s hugely reassuring."

David Field, UK Product Marketing Manager
Trend Control Systems

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