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How Reconomy Exceeded Engagement Targets With Cognism’s Data

Written by Verche Karafiloska | Oct 18, 2021 12:28:59 PM

Waste management experts Reconomy used Cognism's sales intelligence software to:

  • Unearth new job titles and decision-makers to target
  • Find emails and phone numbers for their rapidly expanding ideal persona
  • Run email campaigns to turn cold leads into MQLs, resulting in 40%-50% open rates
  • Exceed engagement targets for their email campaigns
  • Improve the process for getting the data into their CRM
Website: www.reconomy.com 
Number of employees: 200-500 
Industry: Environmental Services 
HQ: Shropshire, UK 
Departments: Marketing & Sales 
Target market: Waste management, HR, Procurement, Health & Safety, Operations and Finance leaders in SMEs and Enterprises. 

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The company

For 27 years, Reconomy has been providing a range of environmental services to customers across different sectors including: construction, housebuilding, retail, wholesale, hospitality, manufacturing, as well as various commercial sectors. 

From creating sustainability policies and strategies, to achieving their zero-waste goals, Reconomy helps clients design a tailored roadmap to effectively manage all resource management activity.

Since Reconomy uses a supply chain of local service providers to deliver the services and are not tied to any particular infrastructure, they are able to design supply chains that suit each customer’s needs and make the process of disposing waste and analysing what happens to it as seamless as possible. 

The challenge

Reconomy’s Marketing Director, Tony Munro, and Digital Marketing Executive, Tom Swinbourne, spoke about the challenges they faced before discovering Cognism. 

Tony told us that Cognism wasn't the first B2B data provider they worked with.

“We have used data providers previously, in a more conventional form. We worked with list brokers who would do some basic modeling for us, and then would give us a database that matched certain criteria.”

But working with static lists didn’t give Reconomy the flexibility they needed.

“We’d give a brief and then we’d receive a list. But if something wasn’t correct, we’d have to remodel the data. Although some of the data was good, there was a lot of wastage and lots of time spent trying to get quality, actionable data for our campaigns. We're a technology-enabled company, and it made sense that we had a slicker system.”

Reconomy is a high-growth company and has tripled in size over the last few years. 

Rapid growth comes with its own challenges:

“One of the challenges we faced was that we had a rapidly expanding set of personas to target. Keeping up with our needs by using a list broker was not effective.”

Tony further explained:

“The role profile of the people ultimately responsible for waste and resource management varies hugely across businesses and sectors. The range of job titles we want to engage with is extensive, from strategic to more operational roles. Being able to run queries on the move and see what comes back against our search criteria was something we wanted to be able to do and now we can with Cognism.”

The solution

At Reconomy, Cognism is mostly used by their marketing department.

“Our sales team also has access in case they need to find something ad-hoc. We use it more from a marketing perspective - it allows us to add good prospect data into our automated campaigns and qualify those prospects. Once qualified, we hand the prospects to the sales team for follow-up.” 

Tom told us more about how Cognism enables Reconomy to run more targeted campaigns.

“Cognism has allowed us to develop our personas further and deliver more targeted comms. Different contacts and roles are interested in different things we offer, and now we’re able to quickly segment our audience and deliver the types of content that specific personas would be interested in.” 

Tony continued:

“We can no longer wait four to eight weeks to get data sets to be able to launch our marketing comms. We do automated campaigns, but also we need to be able to react to market conditions and test new things on the fly. During the COVID pandemic, we had to move faster and Cognism allows us to do that. If there’s a campaign that we want to get live today, we can retrieve the data we need almost instantly”.

The results

For Reconomy, full ROI can take some time to measure due to the length of the sales cycle. So initially, they’ve been tracking other B2B marketing metrics like bounce rates, response rates, and leads generated.

Tony explained:

“Within the first couple of months, we started to notice an improvement in response rates and inquiries generated from the data. Our sales cycle is typically long and complex so ROI needs to be analysed downstream. For bigger companies, it might take six, nine, or even twelve months from the initial contact to becoming a customer. We are monitoring that, but initially we've been measuring other marketing metrics.”

Back when they used list brokers to get data, Reconomy found it difficult to track sales activity and monitor the effectiveness of the data. 

“By using Cognism, we've improved our processes for getting the prospect and campaign data into the CRM and being able to track what's happening to those inquiries.”

We asked Tony and Tom about their campaign performance.

Tom said: 

“The campaign performance is mostly persona and industry-dependent. We have campaigns where we are hitting 40-50% open rates, which is well above our overall target. It depends on how targeted and personalised we can be.”

Tony said:

“We have seen an improvement in open rates and engagement rates and are currently running above our stated target.”

Tony had some final words for us. 

“When I first saw Cognism, I was impressed. I’ve seen a lot of these platforms in the past, and I thought Cognism was probably the most sophisticated platform I've seen. I liked the fact that it can integrate with Salesforce and that it enables you to augment your existing data as well. The speed and flexibility of the system is a big plus.”

Try Cognism’s sales intelligence solution

Over 1,000 revenue teams around the world trust Cognism to:

✅ Build qualified B2B contact databases

✅ Plan and launch their outbound campaigns

✅ Power up their social selling

✅ Meet and beat their revenue targets

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