Zi.Report  looks at how one innovative Zimbabwean company has used online marketing to fuel its growth and profits.

Left: Milton Kamwendo, Managing Consultant of Innov8

On Wednesday 11th February 2004, the first issue of an electronic newsletter entitled “Unleashing Greatness” went out.  This was a pioneering move from a pioneering young business called Innov8 whose mission was to motivate and inspire people to achieve the best they could in life.

The newsletter was meant to assist in this cause and to get more people to be aware of the services that the new business was offering. Owner of the business, leadership coach and motivational speaker, Milton Kamwendo said that he wanted people to know of him and his business before they met him. That way, he hoped, he would build a “wow” factor into his presentations.

The company he approached to manage the newsletter for him was website design and online marketing firm, Venekera Works, which had been running its own newsletter Guided by Light since 2001. Venekera Works had decided that since they had had such success with their own enewsletter they could offer this same service to other companies.

Innov8 became their first enewsletter customer.

“In every one of us there is a giant lying dormant..” began the issue which went out to just over a hundred people. Four years later on 23rd July 2008, issue 200 was sent out to just under 5,000 people.

The journey between those two issues has been an eventful one. In between there somewhere Innov8 bought Evans Shepherd Bookshop in Harare and turned it into Zimbabwe’s most vibrant book chain consisting of six branches in Harare and Bulawayo and more along the way. Kamwendo became one of Zimbabwe’s foremost motivational speakers and the Innov8 brand moved from being about Milton Kamwendo to being about the bookshops, training seminars on topics that range from etiquette and grooming to web design carried out by various industry experts, a vibrant company website and an email marketing campaign that sews all these things together into one fast moving wired company.

The weekly newsletter, Unleashing Greatness, along with other mailshots to the now impressive Innov8 mailing list, forms the core of Innov8’s low-cost-high-return  marketing campaign. Everything, from new books to training seminars are advertised via the list. Every so often Innov8 also uses newspapers to advertise but they have reached a stage where they can sell out new books before they hit the shelves in their bookshops and fill training seminars by sending a simple email to the list.

The architects of this successful online marketing operation were, in part, the Venekera Works team- but, according to Fungai James Tichawangana, then CEO of Venekera Works, much credit goes the visionary and detail conscious Innov8 founder, Kamwendo, who worked with the Venekera Team to continuously tweak the newsletter, grow the mailing list and ensure timely distribution of the mailshots. Venekera Works managed the operation till May 2008, when Innov8 built its own internal online marketing team.

In a country where many businesses are shrinking, Innov8 has made use of information technology to push growth and create a whole new brand of keep-in-touch-marketing.

And the future? Innov8 plans to make online marketing and ecommerce a major part of how they do business in the coming years, as they continue to grow the company.