Winner of the Excellence in the Management of Technology award for 2018, category for emerging enterprises

Find and fetch customers who are most likely to close the deal

It’s a scenario with which every business is familiar: many potential customers express interest in a product or service but only a small percentage of those queries are converted into actual sales. Finding and fetching customers who are more likely to close the deal is the forte of Cape Town-based digital data marketing company FetchThem.

“In a subtle and non-intrusive way, we influence the purchasing decisions of our clients’ customers by making sure the brand is exposed to their decision-makers,” says FetchThem CEO Chris Witthoft.

Here’s an example.

Company A wants exposure to certain chartered accountants in Johannesburg. Company A then gives FetchThem a list of the names of CAs it wants to reach. FetchThem locates them and makes sure that Company A’s display adverts are in front of the selected CAs wherever they go online.

“The important thing is that we integrate all the digital touch points and have a central view. The ads don’t pop up only when the person is on Facebook or Google, but everywhere they go online – across social media and other platforms,” Chris says. “This enhances the brand and keeps it top of mind.”

It’s important not to bombard the target audience, though, so the ads will run for a limited period and frequency, usually between seven and 20 times a month – often enough to be noticed but without becoming irritating.

Converting interest into sales

FetchThem’s technology model is cloud based, integrated into the leading digital platforms and running off Google Infrastructure. It connects to the cloud and clients through its own application programme interface (API), which Chris says can interface with almost any software tool.

One of FetchThem’s biggest successes to date has for a large retail distributor in South Africa, which is 2018 was experiencing that familiar challenge of converting quotations into sales.

“They receive thousands of requests for quotations every month, and were looking for an innovative way to increase quotes to sales,” Chris says. “So we took their offline data online and, within a month, they reported a dramatic increase in sales.”

FetchThem can take at least some of the credit for such successes as its reporting tools track the progress of each campaign and its return on investment (ROI). “Because our API can be integrated into point of sales, we can pick it up when someone is reached online and has actually bought the product.”

He refers to FetchThem’s business model as “account-based remarketing” because it is so targeted. While Chris would not call it a trend yet as account-based remarketing is still in its early stages worldwide, he sees it as one of the ways to solve the marketing challenges of the digital era. “Digital touch points are all over the place and business lacks a central view of what is working best. This helps us to solve that problem; it’s one of the ways that helps integrate all those touch points.”