Harold M. Gettle first established an electrical services provider in the garage of his home in 1954, and the company quickly grew. It was later purchased by the Robert A. Kinsley family and incorporated as Gettle Incorporated. Under the guidance of the Kinsley family, the company began to offer more than just electrical services. Gettle now provides comprehensive solutions to meet its clients’ electrical, automation, fire/security, datacom and engineering/design needs.
Challenge at Hand
As with all professional services firms, Gettle knew that communication with clients was integral to building and maintaining relationships. The marketing and communications team at Gettle had found that email outreach provided them a great channel to share information about projects and new service offerings. Additionally, they wanted to be able to track open and click rates, as well as unsubscribes and bounces that occurred when an email was sent. For outreach and to get these statistics, the team chose MailChimp as their email automation platform.
While they found a solid solution in MailChimp to conduct their email outreach campaigns, they quickly realized that exporting a target list of contacts from their Deltek Vision CRM and importing this list into MailChimp was a time-consuming process. Even more, they were not able to immediately see the critical statistics to measure the performance of their email campaigns in Vision. They were still having to manually update their Vision CRM to reflect the key performance metrics of an email campaign and manually update contacts that unsubscribed from their emails.
Integration to Resolve Issues
Being savvy marketers, the team at Gettle knew there had to be a solution to automate these time-consuming and painfully repetitive tasks. After some research, the marketing team found a Blackbox Connector that seamlessly integrated MailChimp and Deltek Vision. They are now able to build a marketing campaign in Vision and associate the contacts they want to target in their email campaigns. Once they create the email in MailChimp, they can click a button in the marketing campaign in Vision to automatically add the target contacts to the email campaign in MailChimp.
Once the email is sent, tracking the performance of the email becomes critical to determine the effectiveness of the marketing message. With the Blackbox Connector that integrates Mail Chimp and Vision, Gettle no longer has to manually update the open and click information in Vision that is captured by MailChimp. This information is now updated within the Vision marketing campaign automatically. Additionally, contacts that choose to unsubscribe from future emails are automatically updated in Vision.
Time and Money Saved with Blackbox Connector
Prior to implementing the Blackbox Connector integration for MailChimp and Deltek Vision, the Gettle marketing team was spending 4 to 8 hours at least twice a month preparing email lists for campaigns and the same amount of time recording the email statistics from MailChimp to Vision. This integration has saved Gettle between 288 and 432 hours of employee work time or $8,000 to $10,000 annually.
Successful Outcome for Professional Services Firms
“We appreciate Full Sail Partner’s flexibility and guidance during the implementation of the Blackbox Connector as well as the production time we’re saving on the front and back ends of preparing and recording eblast data to and from our CRM,” noted Tracy Bargainer, Marketing Coordinator at Gettle. The Blackbox Connector integration for MailChimp and Deltek Vision chosen by Gettle solved its specific issues pertaining to marketing.