THE CHALLENGE
Whitepages.com is a leader in the identity field, helping individuals and small businesses contact, vet and verify people. From its founding in 1997, the company hadn’t fully embraced the potential of email as a revenue-generating channel. In 2017, Whitepages’ new CMO (now CEO) Leigh McMillan realized that the company’s existing email platform wasn’t sufficient; more importantly, the company’s passive approach to email marketing was leaving money on the table. With a user base of 35 million unique users per month and a vast volume of user data, Whitepages needed scalable new email marketing tools, along with outside expertise to optimize those tools.
THE SOLUTION
Whitepages brought in Julie Clarkson of Kinzie Marketing to transform the company’s email marketing program. Working seamlessly and collaboratively with the Whitepages team, Julie strategized and implemented a number of significant changes, including:
- Migrating the company from its original email platform to the far more dynamic and scalable Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) within a short time frame
- Shifting the company from broadly informational email blasts sent to the entire user base, to highly targeted emails that are event-based and highly personalized
- Focusing on customer segmentation, based on user activity history and other factors
- Leveraging historical user data to create personalized messaging that’s relevant and useful to recipients
- Utilizing email marketing data to optimize the company’s Report Monitor product—making its features more robust, and improving its performance as a revenue generator
THE RESULTS
As a result of its marketing engagement with Julie Clarkson and Kinzie Marketing, Whitepages has reported strong performance results, including:
- Email marketing has surpassed paid marketing as the channel with the highest ROI
- The Report Monitor product is now the company’s #1 revenue generator, with monthly revenue increasing by as much as 250x
- Unsubscribe rates for Report Monitor have decreased significantly, now outperforming industry benchmark levels
- All emails are now event-driven with 1:1 personalized messaging, boosting customer engagement
Leigh McMillan
CEO / WhitepagesI believe that is Julie one of the best email marketers in the country. She has the ability to quickly understand business needs, strategize, and execute flawlessly and fast – at scale. She is a strategic thinker, clear communicator and excels at execution. Quite simply, Julie’s work is extraordinary and yields results.