At Holm&Halby the product is almost secondary. Customers pay for the expert advice and the relationship. And that focus has shaped 25 years of marketing – on the same foundation throughout.
20. juli 2026
Holm&Halby sells laboratory equipment to hospitals, universities and the pharmaceutical industry, and is in dialogue with customers as part of their daily operations. Not only through product sales, but to a particular degree through the professional seminars Holm&Halby runs on an ongoing basis.
Long before email marketing was a fixed part of Holm&Halby's toolbox, they were already segmenting their customers. In the mid-1990s they began tagging customers in their business system with areas of interest and purchasing behaviour – today they have 157 different codes. The logic was clear from the start: relevant communication requires knowing who you are talking to.
The problem was that turning all that knowledge into practice took effort. Communication went out by post. Addresses were copied onto a CD and handed to an agency. Envelopes were stuffed, labels applied, postage paid.
“Just think of all the work involved. At one customer alone there were many different recipients. When someone moved, left or changed role, we got a pile of envelopes back and had to correct them manually in our system,” says Per Juul, Marketing Manager at Holm&Halby.
Postage alone cost 60–75,000 kroner a month. And the workload and the result did not match – because you never knew for certain whether the message landed in the right place, with the right person, at the right time.
That was the problem Holm&Halby set out to solve when, in 2000, they began working with Torben Rasmussen from Yulsn (who ran the company Atteno at the time).
“We were very quick – or smart, as we like to think – to look towards email marketing. I think we were ahead of others. And we still make an effort to be,” says Per Juul.
The collaboration started with a clear goal. Holm&Halby wanted to be able to send targeted emails and know who clicked on what.
That was the main thing.
Over the more than 25 years since, the collaboration has developed a great deal, and the technical solution has been both upgraded and, at times, replaced along the way.
Today the foundation of the solution is Yulsn Marketing Cloud, closely integrated with their Content Management System, ERP system and an event management system that handles all the logistics and communication around Holm&Halby's professional seminars.
The event module was built specifically for Holm&Halby and contains one detail that turned out to make a marked difference from the start:
When registered attendees receive a reminder about an upcoming seminar, they can at the same time cancel or pass their place on if it turns out they cannot come.
A simple move that ensures the seminar places which would otherwise sit empty are filled by other interested people instead.
The event module has most recently been extended with a built-in evaluation module and a range of AI features that make administration easier still.
But what perhaps best illustrates Holm&Halby's approach to marketing is their 1-to-1 emails.
When Holm&Halby invites people to a seminar, the invitation arrives in the inbox as a perfectly ordinary Outlook email.
No campaign design, no visual devices. Instead it opens with ”Hi [first name]“, the sender is a product specialist in the relevant field, and reply-to is set up so the recipient can answer directly.
Every detail is configured automatically in the system so that sender and content adapt to whoever receives the email.
The form of these 1-to-1 emails reflects that Holm&Halby wants to come across as specialists getting in touch. The communication should reflect the expertise rather than stage a brand.
“I am rather impressed by how we pull all the details in from the different places and conduct a little orchestra that way,” says Per Juul of the technical setup that ties it all together.
Holm&Halby is more targeted in its marketing today than ever. The communication is more segmented, more relevant and more personal. And yet the day-to-day running is easier.
“Even though we have actually got better and better over the years, we have also had it easier and easier. Since Yulsn came along, we almost feel like we are cheating,” says Per Juul.
The event module is a good example. It handles registration, confirmation, reminders and follow-up – everything that would otherwise require manual coordination. And it works. When the module was put in place, attendance at the seminars rose from around 50% to 92% – a result that documents what a single, well-placed move can do in practice.
Per Juul duly highlights the event system as something they would be very sorry to be without:
It is effectively a whole marketing employee, sitting and working automatically in the background.”
And the effect of the combined effort? At Holm&Halby they are in no doubt that it is noticeable. Not only the marketing manager himself, but everyone around agrees that the digital marketing deserves the credit for the success Holm&Halby enjoys today.