Roland Corp: Increase Brand Loyalty Through Email Marketing
Roland Corporation U.S. is a leading manufacturer and distributor of electronic musical instruments including keyboards and synthesizers, guitar products, electronic percussion kits, digital recording equipment, amplifiers and audio processing devices. With over 30 years of musical instrument development, Roland sets the standards in music technology for the world to follow.
Since December 2006, Roland has been using Bronto Software as part of their strategic marketing plan. With an email database of over 180,000 people, Roland actively reaches out to this client base with information on new products, new promotions, and content.
Challenges:
As a recognizable brand name, Roland strives to maintain a healthy relationship with its customers. One cost effective method for Roland to maintain communication with customers is through email marketing. Increasing brand and product awareness is among Roland’s primary goals for email marketing.
Early on, Roland initially relied on an outside agency to manage their email campaigns - email content would be sent to the agency, who would then send out the email and provide Roland with a poorly organizedcomprehensive yet hard to digest report. Converting the 3rd party report into meaningful data was labor intensive and inefficient: results had to be extracted one-by-one.
Over time, Roland wanted to assume more involvement of its email-marketing program, they began to look for another ESP with greater ease-of-use and better reporting capabilities.
Other challenges included:
- Managing an extensive database of valued contacts
- Sending multiple email campaigns to 180,000 users, including:
- Roland Insider
- BOSS All Access
- Livewire
- Worship Connection
- Atelier Newsletter
- Dealer News CK
- Instruments of Change
- MV Kit User Newsletter
- Need to drive website traffic
Unlike many online marketers, Roland does not sell directly to consumers, but the company is constantly seeking to foster strong relationships with their target customer base to create brand loyalty.
Solution:
John Hertzberg, Web Producer at Roland, is in charge of email marketing and researched many different ESPs. He found Bronto Software to be the easiest to use - he could manage the many users and multiple lists, and also had reporting capabilities accessible immediately after an email campaign was sent out. John was also impressed by Bronto’s client services, “Whenever I had a question, a Bronto support representative provided an answer fast. The responsiveness of everyone I dealt with was amazing.”
Roland also uses an RSS feeds feature to provide an up-to-date newsletter archive on its website. This gives customers easy access to Roland information and increases brand awareness in the process. “With Bronto it was easy to make RSS work with our email marketing solution,” said Hertzberg.
In an effort to better target the Roland audience, customers are given opportunities to opt-in to email marketing after they have purchased Roland products. Roland sales representatives also have improved mailing list sign-ups by encouraging customers to sign up for contests at music festivals.
Using Bronto, Roland monitors how their segmented lists interact. Even with multiple newsletters being sent out each week, Roland now has complete control of their lists. Actively managing these lists allows for optimal segmentation of user preferences and frequency of message sends.
Reporting has become the most valuable email-marketing feature Roland uses. Comparing overall email campaign performance, as well as evaluating open and click through rates, has become a cornerstone of their email marketing program. In addition to the increased reporting capability, Roland has saved the time needed to compile reports. “With Bronto, pulling reports is actually kind of fun and I can pull a report of last week’s email activity on Monday morning just in time for a 9am meeting,” says Hertzberg.
Results:
Using Bronto, Roland has not only maintained their database, but has also consistently produced:
- Above Average Open rates of 60-80%
- Excellent Reports on the success of email campaigns
- Professional email campaigns which define the Roland brand and image
- Significant spikes in website traffic, up to 58% increase in website hits the day of an email campaign. On average website hits increase 30% the day an email campaign is sent out.
“Superb. Bronto is very easy to use and has the dedicated support I found pleasantly surprising as a small organization.”
Michael Lowery
Development Director,
Ronald McDonald House of Chapel Hill
