How Hal Leonard Europe Streamlined Customer Outreach with Proactive Campaigns

Ross Bayfield from Hal Leonard Europe shared how switching to the Proactive Campaigns app transformed their customer outreach. Previously relying on Outlook mail merges, Ross needed a better way to manage bulk emails with full visibility in Zendesk. Proactive Campaigns offered the perfect solution. It is easy to implement, affordable for smaller teams, and backed by helpful support to resolve early technical issues, such as placeholder formatting.

Could you quickly introduce yourself and your company?

My name’s Ross, and I work for Hal Leonard Europe, specifically working in customer service for the Music Room team. The Music Room website sells lots of different sheet music to musicians.

I work as part of the customer service department for that website, mostly, as well as doing a few other things like working with Zendesk.

What was the biggest challenge you were facing before using Proactive Campaigns?

So the main thing that we needed it for is that we have occasionally some reasons to bulk email our customers, such as if there’s a major issue that needs a long list of customers to be notified together.

How were you handling it before?

Previously, we would have to do that through Outlook and a Mail merge or a similar system. But management wanted all of the contacts to be recorded in Zendesk so it could be reported on. Ideally, but Zendesk doesn’t have a means of bulk emailing very easily, or at the very least, not to the kind of lists we were used to working with.

What made you choose Proactive Campaigns?

Thankfully, the Proactive Campaigns seemed to be exactly what we were looking for as far as giving us the capability through Zendesk, specifically to bulk email these customers, to inform them of details with their orders, and that sort of thing.

How did you first come across Proactive Campaigns?

We found it through the Zendesk application store and then looked at more details on the GrowthDot website about it.

When you were comparing options, what stood out about Proactive Campaigns?

I suppose the key thing for us is that there was an unlimited number of campaigns. We don’t have to worry about the number of campaigns, we make only the number of emails that get sent out per campaign wich is fime as our mailing lists include only a few hundred customers a time.

Let’s talk a bit about getting started. How was your onboarding or initial setup experience?

We did have an instructional meeting that went over the basic functionalities of every system in there, which was very helpful and made the general onboarding very easy to work with.

I had a problem with placing customers’ order numbers from an Excel document into email which is different for each customer. However, I’ve emailed to GrowthDot’s support team, they were very happy to just guide me to how to do that in Proactive Campaigns. And it turns out that through Zendesk there’s similar code (placeholder) you can use to import that information into the customer information in Zendesk.

Now that you’re up and running, how are you using Proactive Campaigns day-to-day?

The main email we send, usually once a week, comes from logistics about items like sheet music or books that are no longer available. If customers ordered these, we inform them their order can’t be fulfilled and a refund will be issued, unless an alternative is possible.

We also use it in cases of unexpected changes. If a book has been updated in some regard, like if something’s been changed about a book, if a new version of a book has come out, and there are customer orders that are going to be affected because of that, occasionally, we might be sent a similar list.

Do you feel like the application improved your support team, for example, efficiency or proficiency, something like that?

Yes. I’m the main person handling this, and I’ve been doing it solo for a while. The weekly item lists come to me, and having everything in Zendesk really helps. When customers reply, it stays in Zendesk, not Outlook, so my teammates can step in if I’m unavailable.

What was the main problem that our application solved for you?

Using Zendesk to send bulk messages with placeholders saves us a huge amount of time. What used to take a day now takes about 30 minutes. It’s been a big help.

Overall, how would you describe your experience with Proactive Campaigns?

The Proactive Campaigns app was exactly what we needed. We are satisfied with the application’s performance and support.

Was there anything that pleasantly surprised you about the product or our team?

It’s been very good so far. The support team has been responsive, though we haven’t needed much help, which speaks well of the software.

Proactive Campaigns works as expected. One nice discovery was the list of tickets generated by campaigns, which has been very helpful and easy to use. Also, we found a potential for our marketing team to use the application in the future.

Would you recommend Proactive Campaigns to others? If yes, why?

I recommend the app, there really haven’t been many negatives.