Converge Technologies Deploys ZINFI Partner Portal Technology to Automate Marketing Campaigns

Challenges

The main challenge Converge faces when marketing its products is simply getting noticed by promising prospects, particularly when some of them are receiving thousands of emails every day. Until recently, Converge’s marketing campaigns were labor-intensive affairs involving a number of manual processes, including content development, email customization, list-building and campaign execution. Given those constraints, reaching a sufficient number of the right contacts with compelling content can be difficult and time-consuming.

Solutions

All of that changed when Converge began using the ZINFI partner portal, which established a direct connection between Converge and the OEM whose products it is introducing the African marketplace. Suddenly, Converge had access to a wealth of marketing and sales assets from the OEM through the web-based partner portal, including multiple turnkey email campaigns that were co-brandable and easy to customize. The portal makes a variety of campaigns available for different products and different target audiences, and campaign setup, execution and tracking are all automated. According to Tomilola Agboola, Supervisor of Sales and Services Administration at Converge, “The portal has been really helpful. It is very rich in content. All you have to do is decide which campaign you want to run. We have the opportunity to add our own content and customize it to make it look the way we want it to. That’s what I like about the ZINFI partner portal.” Agboola is also enthusiastic about having fully automated marketing tools. “I don’t have to go and send out a new email every morning or every week. It’s all automated, and I don’t have to think about creating campaign content on my own.” Getting started with the portal was remarkably easy. The Converge marketing team had a meeting, where they went through various campaigns offered through the portal, made selections, categorized the campaigns by region and made minor customizations to include their own branding and tailor content to their markets. Then they began sending campaigns to various lists. Agboola notes that, over time, she has begun to learn which campaigns are most effective by using the partner portal’s reporting tools to understand who is opening the emails and reading them, and who is unsubscribing. “I really appreciate that aspect” of the portal, she says. Users of the ZINFI partner portal have access to ZINFI’s world-class partner marketing concierge services when they need help, and Agboola is grateful for the consistent responsiveness of her concierge. “If I ever had problems understanding the portal, I could get in touch with the ZINFI representative. He was always helpful to me, always had time for me and was willing to explain everything.”

Results

As a result of integrating the ZINFI partner portal into its marketing workflow, “Our customers have much more awareness about the products we are selling,” says Agboola. “The portal has really been helpful. We’re now able to do much more than we would have been able to through face-to-face marketing or telemarketing. We are also getting more responses from prospects.” Agboola is now a regular user of the portal, and other team members are using it, too. The partner portal has made it much easier to inform customers about platform migration opportunities and spread awareness of its product line. The Converge marketing team is now interested in exploring the powerful web syndication tools that are available through the partner portal so it can reach and communicate with prospects through a broader range of marketing channels.