More meetings with companies you want to win.

Our first campaign put a major regional retailer into our pipeline off the opening email. By the end of it we had signed three contracts, and seven more accounts are waiting to be onboarded. The part we tell other people about is the channel, not the count. We had run cold calls for years. They kept landing us on a switchboard, and the people who could actually decide never rang back. Email reached those people directly, which is why we carried on after the first campaign instead of treating it as a one-off.

We have three sequences running right now, aimed at manufacturing buyers and at grant-funded programmes. 674 replies so far and 442 of those positive, so two thirds of everyone who wrote back wanted a conversation. The newest sequence is 6% through its send and has already returned 45 positive replies from 56. None of them has finished yet. It runs next to the work our own people do rather than replacing it, and we are keeping all three going while the replies come in at that rate.

We win project work through the campaigns now instead of waiting on referrals to turn up. That was the thing we wanted to change. If you own an agency and you are weighing this up, the number that decides it is the simple one: the retainer costs less than the work it brings in. We worked that out before signing and it still holds. The targeting and the writing and the follow-up happen without us, so nobody here spends their week on it, and we have not gone back to waiting.