Audience:
Corporate accounts and employees, Regional and National

Challenge:
After years of marketing through traditional communications vehicles such as collateral and mailings, Sprint PCS needed to revamp its strategies to reach corporations and their employees in a way that would be far reaching, innovative, and cost effective. Sprint also needed to re-educate its potential customers and dispel outdated misconceptions about Sprint’s products and services to incite cell phone users to switch to Sprint.

Solution:
Sprint called on BlueHornet to develop a pilot email marketing program for their Western region marketing directors. Listening to Sprint marketing staff's vision to create a turnkey email marketing system and resource for Sprint marketing managers, BlueHornet's technical team customized their signature technology to methodically communicate via email with Sprint's corporate clients and their employees.

Through this system, marketing managers for Sprint can now identify business and communications objectives, select a tool or group of tools to assist in achieving each of the objectives, and complete a work request form to engage the tool(s). Once the form is completed, a series of pre-designed email marketing communications are customized for the client and delivered. BlueHornet's creative team designed the step-by-step series of HTML email communications encouraging potential customers to transition to Sprint's services, and offering discounted Sprint services to employees as a value-added benefit. Throughout the process, Sprint marketing managers monitor the results of each communication effort through the BlueHornet tool.

To educate customers and dispel misconceptions about Sprint's services, Sprint and BlueHornet also include live links to third party analyses of Sprint's services. By offering these links in promotional emails, Sprint educates consumers utilizing published information from credible sources. This approach has proven to be much more effective than advertising or collateral materials

Results:
Through this email marketing system, Sprint has migrated thousands of new corporate clients and their employees to Sprint, and the statistics prove their success. Click through rates are consistently 90 percent and above.

Corporations and their employees such as: Qualcomm, Kinko's, Hyundai, Boeing, Newell Rubbermaid, Acxiom, Dana Corporation, and Interpublic Group have all signed on as Sprint customers.

Since test implementing this extensive email marketing effort in the Western region, Sprint has adopted the BlueHornet system nationwide. They plan to employ similar email marketing programs within other business channels, tailoring BlueHornet's system to each business segment's needs and objectives.

Testimonial:
"Within our division, we jokingly refer to BlueHornet as our secret weapon because their contributions to our marketing efforts have proven to be such a valuable differentiator for us. Their team is creative and efficient and they understand deadlines. With the competitive nature of telecommunications, we need to act quickly and be nimble; and BlueHornet's support allows us to do that.

The flexibility of the BlueHornet system and built-in tools have made our email marketing program invaluable among Sprint 'marketeers.' Our cost per impression has gone down substantially and the ability to examine click-through rates right away has helped us fine tune communications and see where and how we're most effective. The BlueHornet system is so flexible; we're now using it to generate enthusiasm for our sales team, targeting segments within our client organization and customer prospects more efficiently than we ever have.

In addition, the brilliant creative of BlueHornet has manifested our whole program in a way that has wowed clients, so much so, the clients are now BlueHornet customers."

--Terri Steele
Western Area Marketing Manager
Sprint Enterprise