Dell

LiveBall: A Key Catalyst to Dell’s Global Market Success

[LiveBall] was a key enabler in our online lead gen strategy that resulted in a 10X increase in opportunities for our sales teams in a two year timeframe”

Josh Mueller
Senior Manager of Business Digital Marketing, Dell

background

Dell is a multinational technology corporation that provides technology solutions, services and support.

the challenge

Dell’s Business Digital Marketing team needed a better way to create and globalize custom online lead generation pages. Prior to adopting LiveBall, each new landing page was a multi-faceted project that required several hand-offs: First, Dell would create an IT roadmap, then work with a design team, provide the schematics, get the page coded, and finally transcribe or translate individual pages for each language or region included in the campaign. On average, it took about six to eight weeks to customize and globalize a lead generation form. As a result, the opportunity for the campaign often passed before the form was fully globalized.

the solution

Dell began using LiveBall for their lead capture forms in September 2010.

They started with the page templates that are included with LiveBall, but it wasn’t long before they realized how easy it was for them to create and test their own custom templates without coding or help from IT.

Not only did it take less time, but also Dell was able to speed up the globalization process by giving the regional marketing managers access to LiveBall. After a page was created in one country, the other regional managers could simply sign in, copy and translate the existing lead gen form, and further customize the page for their particular region.

Dell Senior Manager of Business Digital Marketing, Josh Mueller, explained that one of the greatest benefits of using LiveBall has been the decrease in production time, “I can literally have my team here in the States put up a page, email it to my team members in Japan, China, France and Germany and then a couple days later it’s localized and out on the web.”

results

The creation and optimization process that used to take Dell six to eight weeks now takes two to four days with LiveBall.

At first, Dell was only sending Dell.com traffic to LiveBall pages. However, when their first LiveBall page produced a 78% lift in conversions after only two weeks, they couldn’t wait to do more. Dell now has well over 1,000 LiveBall pages running on Dell.com, in their communities and on third-party properties globally—serving everything from gated whitepapers and videos to basic contact forms.

The results that Dell saw in their first two weeks using LiveBall haven’t slowed down. By using LiveBall to further test and optimize their lead generation pages, Dell has seen basic contact form completions rise 50% and on their dedicated landing pages they’ve seen increases as high as 300%.

Needless to say, the other Dell divisions have caught on, and LiveBall is now employed by multiple divisions throughout the company.

the next step with forms

Dell plans to create even smarter forms by integrating LiveBall with Demandbase.

Using LiveBall’s hidden form fields and respondent information from Demandbase, LiveBall will then automatically customize forms and landing pages based on the user. If, for example, a web hit arrives from an IP address that is associated with a company in the healthcare industry, LiveBall can automatically show a form customized for that industry.

Dell is also integrating LiveBall with Eloqua. After a customer’s online behavioral data captured on a LiveBall page, it can be reliably shared with Eloqua, enhancing the profile of the customer and driving appropriate communication between Dell and the online visitor.

more than just forms

When Dell acquires companies, they acquire their marketing systems and everything that they’ve been doing. One significant benefit of using LiveBall for Dell is how easily it integrates with other software platforms. Dell is using LiveBall to bring everything together.

Dell’s projects with LiveBall aren’t limited to simple pages and forms. They have launched numerous campaign-specific microsites including one for a large multi-million dollar US brand campaign.