Telephone research helps jumpstart digital marketing activity for Blåkläder, enhancing database with 4261 decision maker names and 3464 email addresses.
Blåkläder, established in 1959, is a premium global workwear manufacturer based in Sweden with a long and proud history of clothing production, specifically within the industrial sector. The family owned business has a turnover in excess of £100M and is the No 1 functional workwear manufacturer and distributor in Scandinavia, and No 2 in Europe. After over 50 years in the business, the family-run company has a growing and highly respected global brand. The company vision is to increase global distribution of their functional workwear by prioritising production resources and maintaining full control over the entire production process.

Project background
The Blåkläder brand has a particularly strong presence across Europe, but is relatively new to the UK market, which offers significant untapped potential. The objective for Blåkläder was to equip themselves with an accurate and up-to-date database, enhanced with key decision maker contacts to jumpstart their marketing activity and raise their brand profile in the UK market.
The company approached several telephone research agencies including TTMC Research, the Research Division of The Telemarketing Agency, to support their business expansion initiative. After reviewing a number of agencies, Blåkläder selected TTMC Research based on their expertise in the area of data enhancement, and their robust IQCS (Interviewer Quality Control Scheme) and MRS (Market Research Society) accredited quality standards. An Account Manager was assigned to the project and prior to the campaign launch, worked with the client to understand and document the brief and key priorities.
Project execution
Blåkläder had five or six potential target sectors but the priority was to target the construction sector, where their offer was most likely to gain immediate traction. Blåkläder provided an existing database as the foundation for calling and identified a number of business roles that needed to be appended. TTMC Research was required to identify the most senior decision maker contacts likely to be receptive to their proposition, including Health and Safety, Operations and Purchasing Managers. Capturing and appending email addresses was a high priority to support Blåkläder’s proactive email marketing campaigns.
TTMC Research was responsible for data management and data was further segmented according to subsectors to support calling efficiency. The team built and developed a bespoke CATi interface to deliver the data cleanse and enhancement project. The campaign was set up in the CATi platform and the system fully tested prior to campaign launch. As contacts in the construction sector are often out of office and hard to reach, it was anticipated that multiple call attempts would be needed to reach the right individuals.
A further challenge was the fact that the target companies spanned businesses of all sizes, from those with less than 10 employees to large enterprises. As a consequence, job titles could vary dramatically across organisations and callers would need to work their way past gatekeepers, using careful profiling questions to identify the correct decision makers. In identifying the relevant contacts, callers were also required to verify if new contacts were based at the address on the existing company record, and if not, capture the correct address details.
Results
The initial phase of calling took place over three weeks iand was completed within the client’s specified timeframes. Regular reporting and feedback during this period kept the client up-to-date on progress, including the number of contacts obtained to date. 3444 contact names were gathered within 2382 companies, and a total of 2870 email addresses captured to support future digital marketing activity.
Following the success of this initial campaign, a second phase of calling took place. As the framework was already established, the campaign was able to ramp up very quickly and gathered a further 817 contacts within 688 companies, and an additional 594 email addresses to support marketing activity.
As the data was to provide the foundation for ongoing marketing activity, data quality was critical. All emails were verified using TTMC Research’s unique in house email verification program, “E-quality”, to ensure the quality rates were of the highest standard. Data output provided at the end of each phase included companies that had ceased trading, invalid numbers and those outside of the target sector, so that the client would avoid wasting future marketing spend and increase response from a well-qualified, up-to-date set of data.
In addition to this, a minimum of at least 5% of all completed research calls were carefully reviewed and monitored in accordance with the IQCS (Interviewer Quality Control Scheme), an independent organisation, which ensures and maintains standards of data collection within the Market Research Industry.
Following the success of the first two phases of the project, the next step is to review and prioritise the remaining sector opportunities.
"The Telemarketing Company's market knowledge, experience and customer centricity supports a robust understanding of our challenges and opportunities, and enables a speedy response and execution. Regular feedback and dialogue ensured minor adjustments were made dynamically to improve quality and accuracy of responses."
Managing Director UK & Ireland
Blåkläder Workwear Ltd