EI focuses on website marketing

ENDICOTT — With a new website and a new quarterly electronic newsletter, Endicott Interconnect Technologies (EI) is hoping to continue its bounce back from the recession with a strong 2012 that should show an increase in sales.

The new website (www.endicottinterconnect.com) and newsletter are a result of a shift in the way the Endicott–based provider of electronics packaging and solutions brands and markets itself, says Eric Hills, vice president of business development and marketing at EI.

About 18 months ago, the company started the process with new printed materials and has since carried the new look forward with a website, crafted by web-design firm Vibrant Creative of Binghamton, that went live Jan. 4.

While the site features a new look to match the new marketing material, it’s really the behind-the-scenes changes that are making all the difference, Hills says.

Previously, by using analytics such as Google’s ad words, EI was able to tell how a website visitor found the company and where the visitor was from, but not necessarily much else that translated into an ability to sell products and services to people looking at the site.

The key, Hills says, is for EI to be able to reach out to those potential customers looking at the site, downloading technical papers, and showing other interest through the site in what EI does and convert that interest into a sales opportunity.

Now, the company’s website, and even its social-networking pages, are linked with EI’s salesforce.com account to provide that link from interest to opportunity, Hills says.

On the new site, when people download technical information, they provide an email and a few points of interest and that information is loaded into salesforce.com, a cloud-based, sales-management service. “We use that as our engine to get the information to our sales guys,” Hills says. The sales team then uses that information to connect with those potential customers.

It’s a system that is working very well for the company, which targets a very specific market with its semiconductor packaging and assembly products and services to the medical, defense, and other industries. EI customers include IBM, St. Jude Medical, and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Where a typical website may have a bounce rate between 30 percent and 50 percent, meaning that up to half of the site’s visitors quickly click away after realizing they aren’t on the site they wanted to be on, EI’s rate is only about 10 percent to 15 percent, which means the website is doing a good job of reaching the target audience, Hills contends. Being able to follow through with that audience is proving to be a very positive thing. The company is seeing a ratio of about 50 percent in terms of sales leads that actually convert into sales.

Hills expects that will translate to an increase in sales of anywhere from 20 percent to 30 percent over the next several years, following EI’s long sales cycle. It can take anywhere from 18 months to 24 months to land and establish a new customer because of the complex nature of its products, Hills says.

He declined to discuss specifically how this sales increase might impact EI’s top and bottom lines, but did say the company typically generates revenue between $250 million and $350 million annually. 

The new quarterly newsletter is another tool allowing EI to reach out to potential customers as well as existing customers to let them know about new products and offerings from the company, Hills says. The first newsletter went out about two weeks ago to close to 10,000 email addresses, but it’s too soon to gauge reaction to it, he says.

Both the website and the newsletter tie into the EI’s new strategy to stay regional and focused with its marketing and outreach efforts. Rather than attend large-scale trade shows, these days the company focuses more on company-specific shows to which it’s invited to and is funneling the money it saves into the website and newsletter for more widespread outreach, Hills says.

Hills declined to say how much EI has invested in the efforts, which is headed up at the company by marketing associate
James Orband. 

The new website is already generating interest, getting “tens of thousands” of hits per month from tech hotspots in New York, Florida, Texas, and California as well as from locations in China and across Europe. “It’s far exceeding what we’ve had in the past,” Hills says of the new site’s traffic.

Privately owned Endicott Interconnect, which has a 1.39-million-square-foot manufacturing facility in Endicott and a production plant in Shenzhen, China, employs between 1,100 and 1,200 people.