How Blue Bear Self Storage simplified bulk emails with Proactive Campaigns

Blue Bear Self Storage, a UK-based company, was looking for a more efficient way to send bulk communications to its 750+ customers. After struggling with Mailchimp’s disconnected workflow, they turned to Proactive Campaigns for Zendesk.

Today, we will explore how this solution helped them simplify their communication process and achieve better results.

Сould you quickly introduce yourself and your company?

Yeah. My name is Danny Meredith. I am the Head of Operations for Blue Bear Self Storage, a self-storage company based in the UK. We have over 750 customers as it stands using our storage facilities.

What was the biggest challenge you were facing before using our application?

We only recently moved across to Zendesk Support in the new year. Previously, for campaign emails and things like that, we were using Mailchimp, which we found quite clunky to update user lists and things like that. But once I used the demo on the Proactive Campaigns, it was a lot easier, and it kept everything in one place for all of our communications.

How did you come across our Proactive Campaigns for Zendesk?

We used the Email Tracking add-on. I had a look on ‘Try other apps’ and saw it there, and it was sort of like a match made in heaven.

How was your first experience with onboarding into the product?

It was quite intuitive to use and simple. The only real sticking point was the issue of testing the emails, which were sent out twice. So it was notifying the requester of the ticket being raised, along with the actual email going out. But after your help, your team on the chat was able to point me in the best direction to solve that, which, after a bit of fiddling, I managed to get it done.

Were there any other challenges, for example, in the interface or something like that?

No, it was really, like I said, intuitive to use. Following the three steps to set up the initial parameters, along with the emails and the ticketing, was really straightforward.

Coupled with the Email Tracking, it is a really useful combination to see the success rate of the campaigns. And also, along with the actual analytics of each campaign, how many opens, how many clicks, and how many links opened are really useful for analysis as well.

What are the main purposes of using the Proactive Campaigns app daily?

At the moment, the main purposes that we’re using it for and going to be using it for are bulk updates for all of our existing customer base of important announcements. So recently, we updated our terms conditions, so we utilized the platform for that, which made everything really easy.

And on all of our different locations, customers differ from site to site. So if we have an issue on site that we need to let customers be aware of, such as the gate is broken down, we can just import the user list and send everyone a bulk email in one go. It makes things really simple.

Was there anything that pleasantly surprised you about the product?

Being able to use the 7-day free trial was really useful. Because I was able to identify that it’s definitely the product that we wanted to go with, that was quite nice and surprising.

Also, the level of detail on the actual analytics side was surprising, giving me the stats and figures in lifetime reading percentages, emails opened, etc.

And what about the support team? Did you get your request resolved fast?

Yes, definitely. Very quick responses. And even if I logged off for the day and logged back on, the answers were there waiting for me, which was really helpful.

Would you recommend the Proactive Campaigns to others?

Yeah, yeah, definitely would. If somebody is utilizing the Zendesk instance and they’re looking for something that is really easy and intuitive to use to send bulk campaigns to their customer base, Proactive Campaigns is a good solution.

Is there something that you would like to see in the app in the future?

I wouldn’t be able to answer that right now. I’m sure there are features that I haven’t quite utilized yet, something like automating. There are automations as well for brands and campaigns, which I expect we’ll look at using in the future.