CASE FILE

DE-MAR & ASSOCIATES · INDUSTRIAL DISTRIBUTION

The email engine behind a family business’s best months on record.

CASE FILE

WHO THEY ARE

A relationship business with a list it couldn’t fully use.

De-Mar & Associates is a family-run industrial-products distributor in the Kansas City area — instrumentation and process-control equipment representing established manufacturers, plus the legacy-product support most suppliers won’t touch. It’s a relationship-and-reputation business: their customers are engineers and plant buyers who come back because De-Mar knows the applications cold.

The customer list was real and loyal. What they didn’t have was a way to consistently turn that list into repeat business. They came to us to fix one specific thing — the email — and what we built helped drive several of the best sales months in the company’s history.

THE MARKET

Industrial distribution runs on relationships, not clicks.

This is not a market won by funnels and discount codes. De-Mar’s customers are technical buyers who choose a supplier because it knows the application, stocks the right lines, and supports the legacy equipment nobody else will. Trust is the product.

That made the brief unusual: the goal was never to manufacture demand, but to stay present and useful with a customer base that already trusted them — to turn a loyal list into a reliable, repeatable conversation.

WHAT WE ACTUALLY DID

We didn’t hand them a campaign and walk away. We built the engine and taught them to run it.

WHAT WE BUILT

  • The system. Set up their email platform properly — segmentation, broadcast structure, and the automation the team had never had time to configure.
  • The copy. Wrote the broadcasts ourselves — appeals tailored to a long and specific set of customer criteria, in a voice that fit a relationship-driven business.
  • The teaching. Trained their team member to run the day-to-day, so the capability stayed in-house instead of leaving when we did.

THE CHALLENGE

A loyal customer list is only an asset if you can reach it well.

De-Mar’s challenge was three-layered — and none of the layers were about the size of the list.

THE REAL CONSTRAINTS

  • The software was opaque. Nobody on the team fully understood the email platform, so it went underused.
  • The messaging was generic. Broadcasts went out, but they weren’t tailored to how this particular customer base actually decided to buy.
  • The capability was missing. Even a perfect campaign is worthless if the business can’t run it after the consultant leaves.

OUR APPROACH

Two principles drove the work.

THE PRINCIPLES

  • Build it to run without us. The goal was never dependence. We set the system up to be operated by their own team — and trained them to do it.
  • Write to the relationship, not the funnel. This was a business built on trust. The copy had to sound like them, speak to their specific customers, and earn the next request for service rather than chase a quick click.
EXHIBIT A · BROADCAST

FROMDe-Mar & Associates

TO[ the customer list — segmented ]

REThe legacy line nobody else supports

Still running the old unit? Good. So are we.

Most suppliers stopped answering questions about that line years ago. We didn’t — because half the plants we serve still run it, and “replace everything” isn’t a plan, it’s a budget crisis.

If it’s due for service, or you just want a straight answer about parts, reply to this email. A person reads it — the same person who knows your application.

— the De-Mar team

REPRESENTATIVE BROADCAST · STRUCTURE & VOICE AS SHIPPED

THE OUTCOME

The months that followed were among the strongest the company had recorded.

WHAT HAPPENED

The rebuilt email system became a reliable driver of repeat business, and the months that followed were among the strongest the company had recorded. Just as importantly, the team could run it themselves — the capability stayed in the building.

THE HONEST EVIDENCE

We’ll be straight about the evidence, because that’s the whole point of how we work: a growing business has many moving parts, and we won’t claim the email was the only one. What we can say is that the results were real, the client saw them firsthand, and they connected them directly to the rebuilt email engine. De-Mar is a private company — their internal numbers are theirs to share, not ours.

HOW IT ENDED

The engagement eventually wound down for structural reasons inside the family business, not because the work stopped delivering. We parted on good terms.

CLIENT ON RECORD

In his own words.

“In a small business, everyone wears many hats, and trying to do your own marketing feels overwhelming. Wabbit to the rescue! They helped us tailor our broadcast efforts to a very long and specific set of criteria, and demystified the software and coding process. They also helped refine our appeals to our customer base. They were always friendly and professional, and available to meet with us and answer any questions we had. Thanks to Wabbit, we are engaging with our customers like never before and seeing an increase in requests for our services.”

— Chris Foster, President, De-Mar & Associates, Inc.

MORE FROM THE FIELD

See the rest of the work.

WHERE THIS STARTS

Book the Architecture Sprint

De-Mar didn’t need more marketing. They needed the one system that mattered, built right and handed back. The Sprint is how we figure out which system that is for you — before anyone spends a dollar building it.