From data mining to digital journeys

Marel mined 8.3 million data points and orders from more than 12,000 customers to bring home more bacon.

Challenge

Many companies have a hard time combining their marketing and sales efforts, and also struggle to make good use of data. This is especially true for B2B companies, but Marel decided to face these challenges head on with a very ambitious digital customer program in 2021.

Marel is a leading global provider of advanced food processing equipment, software and services to the poultry, meat and fish industries.

Approach

With 2nd and 3rd party data on potential customer getting increasingly difficult to obtain and use, Marel decided to focused on 1st party data on existing customers. The project started out with a thorough data mining process diving into more than 20,000 orders from 12,000 customers which was in the scope for this project.

The goal of analyzing all this data was to discover relevant patterns in the products customers were purchasing and map out frequent product pairings. Then, standing on this solid framework of knowledge, Marel and Merkle went on to create the customer journey programs and creative work aimed at increasing Marel’s success in cross-selling to active customers and re-engaging inactive customers.

Results

The program is stilling running, and it has been an immense success for both Marel and the customers. When presented with timely and highly relevant product options, customers engage much more with the Marel brand and eventually go through with the relatively long process of investing in more Marel equipment and software solutions.

60%

uplift in order value and 20% uplift in average order value from marketing attributed orders

- from orders directly attributed to this marketing activity

82%

uplift in marketing pipeline value year-over-year

– from all marketing generated prospects

67%

uplift in MQLs year-over-year

20%

uplift in conversion rate from SQLs to orders

– from all Sales Qualified Leads to actual orders