Bringing pest control giant Anticimex into the digital age

Anticimex is a global modern pest control company and is committed to providing healthy environments in a sustainable, eco-friendly way. With nearly 85 years of experience, and with 4,500 employees, Anticimex focuses on prevention rather than cure.

The challenge: creating a 21^st century customer experience

Anticimex has a split customer base, all with different service requirements and different budgets. Its commercial customers require pest control, building environment, and hygiene and food safety services, which are often highly regulated. Private homeowners require pest control services on a smaller scale to ensure healthy homes. Anticimex needed its customers, no matter their location, whatever their request, to access the right services in the fastest way, in their area.

To attract their target customers across different regions, the brand was aware that it needed to leverage greater targeting capabilities for its paid media campaigns. Anticimex needed to understand the digital context of each visitor – discover why they were visiting the site, where they came from, and why they ultimately contacted the brand. With this rich contextual data, they could then target the customers who truly wanted to buy.

The solution: keeping costs down – and converting at the right time

As with any business, Anticimex wanted to ensure it was not wasting budget, particularly for its search marketing campaigns. The marketing team were aware that their pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns were driving calls, but were unsure which campaign and which target audience was the most successful. In order to hone audience targeting and budget efficiency, they needed to accurately attribute campaigns to calls.

Anticimex knows that 86% of its prospects convert during the research phase. The majority of these convert on product pages rather than ‘Contact Us’ pages, so it was a priority to ensure Freespee’s unique-to-visitor dynamic phone numbers – phone numbers unique for each page visitor – clearly visible on each page. Freespee’s Google AdWords integration allows this conversation data to be fed into Anticimex’s PPC campaigns, serving to improve optimisation and targeting. Additionally, by integrating inbound keyword searches into Freespee’s Conversation Cloud, Anticimex was able to identify the highest value prospects.

Freespee also built an interim solution that automatically pushes call data into the platform. This data could then be viewed by relevant teams (sales, account management or support) so that employees could proactively identify leads without having to first check their Customer Relationship Management (CRM), resulting in rewarding conversations with consumers.

The results: looking towards a brighter future

As a result of Freespee’s work, Anticimex’s call through rate (CTR) has now increased by 77%.

Freespee was also tasked with driving higher value calls (more than one minute duration) from paid media campaigns. By integrating inbound keyword searches into Freespee’s customer conversation platform, Anticimex was able to identify the language used by highest value prospects. This strategy has resulted in a 50% increase in calls versus forms filled out on the campaign landing page.

Anticimex initially employed Freespee to drive digital transformation in Sweden – but the customer communication platform’s success has had a wide effect. Having improved sales efficiency, enhanced customer call experiences and proved the value of digital marketing budgets, Freespee’s software has now been rolled out across eleven of Anticimex’s markets. Freespee is continuing to prove the value of a phone conversation to a brand’s growth – and Anticimex is continuing to use its services to keep driving digital transformation.