Aptus

Bolton headquartered Aptus installs the essential gas, electricity and water connections needed before a brick can be laid on a new housing or commercial property development.  The company also installs street lighting and EV charging points.

Since being set-up in 2010, Aptus has grown steadily and opened offices in the north west, north east, Yorkshire and Cumbria.

In 2022, Aptus decided to expand its footprint to the Central Region of England.  Ahead of opening a physical office, they asked us to announce their imminent arrival and ensure Aptus was on the radar of prospective customers in the area.

Working closely with their sales team, we curated a list of named individuals at leading housebuilders and developers across the region.  This was quite an onerous task due to stringent GDPR requirements but it was worth the effort to have a compliant and clean target list of circa 50 named contacts.

The Aptus sales team could simply have ‘cold called’ these targets but instead, we recommended they send each target personalised ice breakers that the Aptus team could use as a conversation starter.

Thankfully, they were happy for us to get creative and use a combination of tactics to capture attention.  We planned a sustained direct marketing campaign which took place over a six-week period.

Pop-up mailer

We started off by designing a physical ‘pop-up’ mailer which was guaranteed to get noticed on account of it being so different from typical one-dimensional mailers. Intelligent copy and clever artwork ensured the mailer succinctly conveyed what Aptus does.

This was mailed in a striking green envelope to our named contacts.  One week later, we targeted the recipients with an eshot.

Biscuit delivery

A week after that, we posted a tin of luxury biscuits to each of them, along with a copy of the latest version of the Aptus newsletter, Connections (usually delivered digitally but printed especially for this campaign). Again, this was followed-up with an eshot.

The third and final eshot in the campaign used tongue in cheek copy referencing the many ways Aptus had used to get on their radar and inviting them to make contact with any projects they’d like to discuss.

CAMPAIGN FOLLOW-UP

At this point, our work was done, and it was over to the Aptus sales team to make the follow-up calls which are so essential in such direct marketing campaigns. To give them further ammunition, we wrote and designed a brief introduction to Aptus for them to send to the prospect, along with relevant case studies, following their call.

Our brief was simply to put Aptus on the radar of decision makers in a new geographic region. Despite it being early days, the Aptus team has already received inbound emails and phone calls from many of the recipients expressing interest in the company’s services and saying they will be included in the next tender.

MULTI-CHANNELLED APPROACH

Although there were many elements to this campaign – creative concepts, copywriting, design, production of artwork, eshots, print, sourcing of biscuits and packaging, collating and posting – the cost per lead was minimal.

In short, our campaign turned cold contacts into warm prospects.

Our brief was to put Aptus on the radar of decision makers in a new geographic region. The six-week campaign has already resulted in one recipient awarding Aptus a six-figure contract and several targets expressing an interest in the company’s services and saying they will be included in the next tender.

Given the company’s excellent track record for securing repeat business, the actual ROI for this small, creative campaign is incalculable and has already paid for itself MANY, MANY times over!

In short, our campaign turned cold contacts into warm prospects. To quote Dan Owen, Business Development Director at Aptus:

“We had never done anything like this before. RMS produced something completely different and it worked. It has put us on the map and into the minds of people we want to do business with and it has certainly opened doors.”