Fusion5 is a region-leading business solutions company, with over 450 staff and nine offices across New Zealand and Australia. It runs technology events year-round, reaching out to pre-qualified leads and prospects via email and social media campaigns.

The numbers game

One particular event series, scheduled for late 2019, wasn’t attracting enough attendees to make it viable. It became apparent that Fusion5 needed a little help.

“We had an event that we were running across Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane,” says Gareth Boyle, Senior Marketing Executive for Fusion5 Australia. “Our initial approach of sending out emails with invitations and content simply wasn’t working. So we added in other tactics, including paid advertising on LinkedIn and getting our account managers to call customers directly.

“We also had a list of close to 1000 pre-existing contacts in the verticals we wanted to attract. The list was a little out of date, and the percentage of contacts opted-in for email communications was low, but we knew it had value if we could get it verified and legally compliant. Our marketing manager, Trudi Allerby, had good results from Hot Leads in previous engagements in New Zealand, and recommended them. So I asked them to tackle the data clean-up process.”

Hot help, great reporting

Gareth asked Hot Leads to make contact with each person on the list and ask if they’d like to receive an invitation to the event. While at the same time using the opportunity to update any changed details, and of course confirming if the contact was happy to remain on the database.

“From there, I worked with the Hot Leads team to create a calling script I felt covered the exact messages we wanted to convey, and they pretty much got to work from there.”

Gareth particularly appreciated the daily reporting. “It was very thorough. It certainly gave me good insight into the validity of our data, and the process raised the database integrity significantly. Hot Leads reignited interest in Fusion5 from people we hadn’t heard from in quite a while.

“The whole project was complementary to our other outreach programs, and as a result, we got the numbers to make the upcoming events viable.”

A squeaky-clean list

According to Gareth, Hot Leads culled around 40% of the names on the list. “However, if they couldn’t reach the original person on the list, they asked to speak to an equivalent. So sometimes uncovered and added new and qualified contacts.”

“Hot Leads took a good consultative approach to the project,” says Gareth. “Despite having very little notice, they were very understanding. And once I organised my brief, they moved fast! But the thing that impressed me the most was that despite the quality of data we gave them to work with, Hot Leads maximised the possible outcomes.”

The event was a huge success, attracting the numbers of qualified attendees needed to generate the desired return on investment. About 15% of the attendees came from Hot Leads’ data cleansing, and even better, Fusion5 now have a fully updated, compliant and qualified list for future events.