“Creative Play was founded in 1991 as a playground equipment manufacturer. We currently employ 65 people based all around the UK, although the majority work at our production facility in Chester. On average we work with between 300 and 500 schools per year and have helped more than 12,000 individual schools create awesome outdoor play spaces and learning environments.”
“I’m a firm believer in the full marketing mix so we carry out direct mail campaigns 3 times a year, attend around 20 conferences and exhibitions, have an outbound sales team who contact customers via the phone, invest heavily in our website and digital advertising etc. We have used email marketing quite a lot over the last 10 years or so but very much with generic school email addresses and with limited results.
When I got in Sprint Education, what I was looking for was two things. Firstly, a solution that helped us to drastically improve the effectiveness of our email marketing, and secondly, a way to manage all of our marketing channels from one central place.”
“I was attracted to Campus because it allowed us to target teachers directly and in a more personalized manner, and because it would also allow us to integrate all our marketing channels with each other rather than each channel standing on its own.
“The primary benefit of Campus has definitely been access to named email addresses and contact details that are continuously updated. By having access to named teacher email addresses, and a wealth of school context data, we can target specific groups and personalize our marketing to a level we could only dream of before.
“Our sales cycle is quite long (approx. 3 months) and there are considerable costs incurred to get to the point of sale such as on-site meetings. The education data list builder allows us to target specific geographical regions to open opportunities in the exact location at the appropriate time to ensure that appointment calendars are efficiently planned, saving time and money.
“The email module is great for creating emails too. Previously this was carried out by our graphic designer who knew a bit about HTML, this put the pressure on 1 person. Now anyone can create a template without any technical knowledge, even I can do it so it must be easy!
The built in CRM, quotation and sales modules are the icing on the cake and allow us to record all our activity in one central place. The whole of Campus is very straightforward to use and the on-boarding support is superb. Responses to questions are very quick and the support team know exactly what they are doing.”
“Since using Campus we have seen an increase of around 10% in the quantity of leads. However, this is a small part of the picture. We never really had a problem generating leads, the issue was generating QUALITY leads at the right time to improve efficiency.
The leads generated using Campus are simply better quality. A 10% increase in leads relates to around 35 additional orders per year, at an average order value of £16,000 that would be an increase in revenue of over half a million pounds, our Q1 figures reflected similar growth to this and I believe a large proportion of this would be down to the addition of Campus to our marketing strategy.
Campus also saves us a lot of time, particularly with the CRM and quotes modules. Previously all quotes were produced by our design and estimating team. Our proposals need to be very visual but there are times when we don’t need to provide a full design presentation. On average we are now able to quote for around 30% of our projects simply through campus. This cuts down the time the customer is waiting for a response from 2 weeks to 24 hours, providing a far better customer experience.
We generally carry out one campaign every month based around the Forms functionality. We have found that providing something like a white paper, funding guide, etc. acts as a great ‘hook’ to get the customer interested. By filling in the form to access this resource, the potential customer can provide a wealth of information to pre-qualify the opportunity. We find customers are far more willing to give information about buying intent or available budget within an electronic form as opposed to on the phone or even face to face.
Before we approached Sprint we were looking at other potential CRM solutions such as Salesforce but when we found Campus it was no-brainer because of the data integration. I’m sure we’ve saved a lot of time and money as a result of not having to buy standalone data, try to import it into a generic CRM system, and then keep it all updated ourselves. I couldn’t be happier with how it’s turned out!”
Creative Play have been designing, manufacturing and installing high-quality playground equipment in the UK since 1991.
Chester
Currently work on between 300 - 500 school playground projects every year.
UK SCHOOLS & STAFF
US SCHOOLS & STAFF
