Posti: Building an effective B2B marketing funnel

Finnish mail and logistics company Posti is deep into a mission to modernize.

Through most of its 380-year history, Posti’s role was like that of any national postal service: sorting and delivering letters, postcards, and the occasional package. Then came the rise in e-commerce, driving massive growth in the market for parcel deliveries and fueling competition between logistics service providers.

Posti has responded well, retaining its number one position on the Finnish market and expanding to seven other countries. Today, the company’s growth is driven by sales of fulfilment and delivery services to webshops and other e-commerce businesses. Posti has transformed itself from a domestic B2C player into an international B2B logistics service provider.

This remarkable transformation has been accompanied by some savvy shifts in the company’s marketing strategy. Posti has put a lot of work into developing its online customer experience, while also investing heavily in digital marketing across various channels. B2B customers are now managed through Salesforce, which Fluido has been helping Posti with for some years.

Understanding the pipeline

One of Fluido’s most recent challenges was to build a stronger connection between Posti’s marketing funnel and its pipeline in Salesforce. Samuel Tenhunen, Posti’s Head of Digital Sales and Marketing, explains how the project began:

“We first asked Fluido to create a bottom funnel report that connected our lead generation to our sales process. This worked magnificently, so we decided to tackle the upper funnel reporting too,” says Tenhunen. “Studying the upper funnel is about measuring the impact of each euro we spend on marketing, so we can better understand how a specific activity generates contacts, leads and opportunities.”

To create the reports, Fluido helped Posti build connections between four different domains:

1. Salesforce – data on all sales funnel and CRM activities
2. Google Analytics 360 (BigQuery) – data on website visits and visitor behavior
3. Supermetrics – data from paid advertising, such as search, social media & display
4. Microsoft Power BI – the reporting platform where the dashboards are created

The result of the work is a set of unified and automated dashboards that now demonstrate the impact of Posti’s different marketing activities on its sales funnel. This data can be explored on the basis of campaigns, business units and individual leads, enabling Posti to study its marketing ROI on a much deeper and more precise level than was previously possible.

“There were a lot of sources we needed to connect in order to make sure the data is tracked properly,” says Tenhunen. “Things like naming and tagging campaigns, or identifying site visitors and connecting their activity with their Salesforce profile. Fluido has an excellent understanding of these integration properties and what had to be done to link the different attributes.”

Connecting different data sources

Fluido’s role in the project was led by Senior Web Analytics Consultant Taneli Salonen, who joined us in early 2020. He’s a specialist in Google Analytics and Google Cloud.

“One of the challenges in digital marketing is that advertising is done across many different digital channels. You can usually get statistics from each of these sources, but you need to bring all the data together yourself if you want to see the full funnel all the way through to the leads and opportunities in a CRM system,” says Salonen.

“Posti wanted to understand the lead-generation impact of all its digital channels,” he says. “They gave us free hands to go out into the company to find the right stakeholders so that we could connect all the different data sources. They really put a lot of trust in us.”

The right experts, at the right time

Over the course of the project Fluido brought in experts in Supermetrics, Power BI and other analytics programs. Tenhunen says he appreciates this flexibility and Fluido’s proactive attitude to getting the work done.

“There are a lot of different stakeholders in Posti, but we haven’t needed to manage Fluido in terms of telling them who to talk to. They have been very proactive in finding the right people and making sure there is something concrete to show as a result of the collaboration with each of them,” says Tenhunen.

“Fluido has been very flexible too,” he says. “There were times when we needed to work fast, and there were other times when we slowed down the speed to study the data. The team has been great in accommodating the changing pace of our work.”

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