B2B

How ADP's Online Resource Center Drove Leads and Sales to Produce Over 1700% ROI

The Challenge: ADP Employer Services offers outsourced payroll, tax regulatory management, human resource management systems (HRMS) and benefit services for employers of all sizes. The group had scads of valuable content and tools, like payroll calculators, salary surveys and informative news articles, which were available throughout the vast ADP.com Web site – but were sometimes difficult for visitors to find.

ADP and Web marketing and technology firm DigitalGrit invented a strategy to compile all that valuable content in a single spot. The team decided to create a Resource Center, located at www.resourcecenter.adp.com, within the existing ADP site for payroll, HR and benefit managers, as well as accountants and small business owners. This new "sitelet" would be a single point of information for end-users - and a valuable lead generation tool for ADP.

The Strategy: The team launched an integrated Web marketing program to maximize the potential of the Resource Center. The program employed many tactics, including email. "It seemed wise to utilize a 'Push-Pull' strategy," says Margit Rademacher, Manager, ES Marketing Services at ADP. "We've got a site that's rich with incredibly useful content that's very easy to leverage. Users come to the site when they need information; emails push out content that drives users back to the site."

While adding a large button for the Resource Center on the ADP.com homepage aided in directing traffic, the following tactics were used to facilitate lead generation:

• Content Management:
  Per the team's original vision, relevant content was gleaned from throughout ADP's site and logically organized within the Resource Center. The Center's home page gives visitors the option to seek information on HR & Benefits or Payroll & Tax. (More general information, like news releases and industry events are also posted on the bottom of the page.) The content is refreshed regularly, rotating products and service offerings and news as available. For high-value content, a "Premium Content" offering was created.

  When visitors attempt to access Premium Content, recognizable by a key icon, they're presented with a barrier page. The page asks for a "Preferred User Login" – then offers a free registration process to those who wish to continue.

• Behavioral Marketing:
  Additionally, all Premium Content users are cookied. If the same visitor returns to any of a select group of tools (for example, a payroll calculator) three times, they'll receive a pop-up asking if they would like an ADP representative to contact them with more information regarding the service related to that tool.

• Email Marketing:
  An opt-in email list of over 30,000 users was built using the Preferred User registration. When site visitors sign up for the Premium Content, they're asked about the content that interests them, then offered a true opt-in for information relative to those topics.

  The Premium Content email, sent out approximately every other month, focuses on timely, topical issues. Past articles have included new reporting requirements for employers, tax law updates and compliance issues. The actual HTML email contains a link to the complete ‘value-add’ article, so recipients must click through to read the article in its entirety. Each piece is also equipped with a "send-to-a-colleague" link to drive further traffic to the Resource Center.

The Results: Since this ongoing project began in 2001, over 50,000 users have registered for premium content. 30,000 have opted-in for email communications. On ADP's site, the Resource Center homepage one of the top 5 most frequently visited pages.

Of the 50,000 mentioned above, 18% of those registered users have converted to hard leads. In fiscal year 2004 (which ended in June), that translated to 1426 leads.

On the premium content email campaign, during 2004 the open rate was over 50%, with click-throughs to full articles as high as 17.49%. Opt-out rates have not exceeded 0.52%. Click-throughs from articles to landing pages average over 14%.

The behavioral campaign has also performed well. The popup ad yielded over 750 leads and more than 120 business starts in fiscal year 2004

In total, the Resource Center has yielded an ROI of 1784%

See the Resource Center: www.resourcecenter.adp.com