The Terrapinn Story

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I'm going to illuminate an aspect of how online is being used to improve business. What I want to focus on particularly is brand and brand equity, which has got to be one of the most important objectives for an organisation during a period of downturn – to maintain its value in order to establish a better stage for growth.

We worked for an organisation called Terrapinn. You may or may not recognise its logo, but it is, in fact, one of the world's largest conference organisers. There are 400 events that it puts on in Sydney, Singapore, New York, London, Dubai and various locations in South Africa. The organisation has been around for over 10 years. It's highly, highly process driven in terms of how it organises and manages its business. That has been a secret of its success. So, it comes up with a good conference idea, such as Hedgefunds World, which it came up with about five years ago. There are now 17 of those events happening around the world.

And the way it manages this is to take a big idea, convert it into something that will operate on a stage, identify its market, market to the people and create the event and then take that process into locations around the world – and it does it incredibly quickly. The people they employ are hugely creative. They're encouraged to be inventive and experimental, they think about the customer all the time. For instance, one of the things that Terrapinn does with its conferences is that it really encourages people not to use powerpoint slides to generate a real sense of engagement and buzz. Its CEO – we made a video with him recently – described what the organisation does as 'creating show business for business people', which I think is a nice description of the conference business.

However brilliant and marvellous they are at creating these events, sometimes the mechanics of a process-driven organisation get in the way. I don't know whether you will agree or not, but these are a couple of websites for two different events: Low-cost Airlines and Managed Accounts, a financial event. Very dull, doesn't look particularly different from anything else happening in the conference industry. In terms of the mechanics, they were sending out millions of emails to a single list, which ultimately started to suffer from 'list fatigue' as recipients were being sent information from lots of different sources. There were massive cross-selling issues as people were literally being overloaded with emails because someone in one production team thought that their event over here would match someone else over in that production team. So they were actually beginning to cannibalise their own market base with a much undisciplined approach to email.

It was also an incredibly resource-draining process that they were going to. There were no particular templates that the teams could follow when they were creating their websites and their emails, and salespeople and marketing people were getting bogged down with html and design and content – and not content, I should say, because they were so focused on the mechanics of producing these sites and emails that the message was being forgotten and by the time they had created the framework to drop things into, they'd literally turn them into push marketing messages - 'buy a ticket now', 'come now' – and they weren't talking about the event. And ultimately the conferences that they put on are part of the industry and the working life that their customers were buying into, so simply to be sold to was running the risk, and in some cases actually led to, certain parts of their customer base being alienated. These do not look like as though they come from the same organisation; they were creating brand confusion.

So what does this mean for the customer? Basically, the process was in the way. So recipients became numbers on a database, not people, and the message was pure push. The whole approach was about distributing information to people rather than letting people come to them and access the information. This is an email [displays slide example]. Imagine getting that into your inbox! And, seriously, these aren't just gaps where they didn't have the image; they were simply just repeating a logo against speakers. This is the content of the largest event in the low cost airline world, which attracts 700 people. It's a massive conference by business standards and this is the way they were talking to their customers in their inboxes. There was no user experience being considered, no conversation and the branding was almost non-existent.

They knew they had a problem and it was becoming increasingly important for them to solve it because they were running chaotic internal systems which were becoming very costly. So they came up with a template solution. Behind this lies a whole data management system from a company called Smart Focus which has an integrated email platform from their fellow company, Email Reaction. This was great – they could manage the data, they could shunt it around and it introduced for the first time proper segmentation systems, which they hadn't been able to deal with before.

The next problem was to get the production team thinking about the content. What was the conversation, what was going to go out into people's inboxes and then be correlated back into a website? Now, you've got 400 events a year, that's 400 websites a year than organisation of 500 people have to create internally, plus 12-month email campaigns, running maybe an email every month. That's a lot of work to do. There's a lot of intellectual thought required to keep those messages fresh and relevant for the recipient.

So we created a template to be applied first to the website and then to the email. It allowed content to real take centre stage, for conversations to begin to be built between recipients and the various Terrapinn teams. It opened up ways of applying tone to invite participation, to create a two-way conversation with very specific areas. So it was an email of 12 going to potential sponsors for a major event, or an email being distributed to 5,000 potential delegates, it meant there was room to create a very specific conversation with those people.

It meant, finally, that resources were being allocated to the content and not the programming and the design principles we used avoid html crashes. I'm not going to go into the technical details, but this is the solution we came up with, which was almost a one-size-fits-all, which, online, we can shrink and expand. We designed it from the maximum so that people only had to worry about taking items out and we pre-designed a lot. That's what our email newsletter began to look like for low-cost airlines.

The challenge then was to get everyone to produce these emails and websites with their own different banners across the top. So four quite different events there across the top areas, but quite distinct from each other and then we pre-prepared all these graphic pieces which are a nightmare when you're dealing with emails and graphics so to be able to pre-prepare every possible offer people would like and every possible call to action message and then producing them in six neutral colour ways so that we could adapt the email shape with its own brand on a continual basis for people and then just letting the team deal with content. We ran workshops to help them focus on how to have online conversations, what to deal with in terms of creative development. We created a 24-page guide that allowed people to understand how to write slightly differently online and how to create content online. We wanted, most of all, to inspire and engage the teams to really get energetic about their content as opposed how it was going to get into people's hands, which was their main concern before.

As you can see, they now produce personalised, timely and useful emails. They don't look the same, but you can see the same broad template shape and the same with websites. That's an old website for Hedgefunds World and that's the new look website which is much more focused on content, what's being discussed in a very technical area and it's much easier to put that page together than the other one.

So, the results! Very valuable planning and team efficiency. A lot of cost-saving in terms of actual resources employed in creating communication pieces. Massive improvement in brand consistency across all of the events, as well as the Terrapinn brand itself. There has been a lot of discussion in the press about Terrapinn's recent boost and appearance and solid adherence to its own brand principles, which has got to be very positive for its balance sheet. Massive reduction in the number of emails being sent out these days, but a dramatic improvement in its core metrics of open rates, click-through rates etc. And rising audience retention, which is the other Holy Grail in the conference business. But most importantly, its new online presence has established a new stage for its own growth through a much more stable and cohesive brand presence.

So that's the Terrapinn story. Thank you very much for listening.