Onesend and ActiveCampaign support Australian office gear sales

What does the martech stack for an Australian B2B office supplies dealer look like? We asked Elle James, head of marketing and sales systems at Stuart & Dunn Office Choice based about two hours out of Sydney.

“We rely to a large extent on the Office Choice national support office,” she said. The stack includes Pronto’s CRM (Pronto is an Australia-based business management vendor). “That then feeds into our ecommerce platform, which is Commerce Vision. That now seamlessly connects to ActiveCampaign. We now have data from all of those platforms baked into ActiveCampaign.”

She also uses Onesend, a solution that scales email and SMS messaging for multi-location and franchise brands.

Unlike the other components mentioned, ActiveCampaign is not Australian.

The Onesend acquisition

Chicago-based ActiveCampaign acquired the Australian platform Onesend in October. ActiveCampaign’s central offerings include marketing automation and email marketing as well as CRM. Onesend had previously been an APAC partner of ActiveCampaign.

ActiveCampaign CEO Jason VandeBoom called out Onesend’s “20+ years of experience in working with multi-location organizations” in a release announcing the acquisition. The specific tools Onsend brings to the table are:

• OnesendHQ, an email and SMS platform for multi-location and franchise brands to scale their email and SMS messaging.
• POSIFiQ By Onesend, a platform that integrates POS systems with ActiveCampaign.
• OnesendHQ Portal Companion, which expands ActiveCampaign partner portal capabilities. 

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Stuart & Dunn Office Choice and Onesend

“At Stuart & Dunn Office Choice, we started with Onesend,” said James. “That was brought in by Office Choice national support office. They still use the Onesend platform to create templates and do push-down campaigns for all of the sites. The sites themselves use ActiveCampaign rather than the Onesend platform.”

The local use of ActiveCampaign gives dealers the ability to create their own content in an “easy-to-use platform,” as James described it, “for dealers who are less tech-savvy.” National campaigns are pushed down on a weekly or fortnightly basis from Office Choice which has over 100 office locations.

On the Onesend side, James lists awareness campaigns and online promotional campaigns. “The joy of the Onesend side is that Office Choice can send on our behalf, or provide us a link for the template which is what I opt for. I can upload that into ActiveCampaign and send it to our specific lists we have set up rather than send it to our whole database.”

The lists are broken out into different industries — for example, education versus commercial. “It’s about being more specific. Big furniture purchases will segment through to owners and decision-makers rather than receptionists.”

As for education, back-to-school is a very busy period for Stuart & Dunn Office Choice and the ability to automate email campaigns has been, James said, a “lifesaver.”

Stuart & Dunn Office Choice has been working with ActiveCampaign for about two years and integrated it with their ecommerce solution in May of this year. James was able to indicate the impact of ActiveCampaign on email performance:

• 12% increase in open rate.
• 6% boost in click-thru rate.
• Total ecommerce revenue that comes direct from ActiveCampaign emails: 14.5%.

Easy-to-use is important

The ActiveCampaign interface has made life easier for Office Choice dealers. “One in particular, in Sydney, is a good friend of mine,” said James, “but he is not tech-savvy at all and there are times I will feel like I am sitting under a desk, rocking quietly, when I’m on the phone to him. But he’s been able to pick it up really quickly and he is running his own race now. If he can do it, anybody can.”