Just to remind us that the industry isn’t infused only with celebu-spokesmodel ad campaigns, the death of the :30, CP + B’s microsite of the month and Donny’s package in a Speedo, there’s some real, down and dirty, successful direct marketing going on over at enterprise software company SAP America which recently launched a direct marketing campaign to CxO level executives at the nation’s top 150 banks. The campaign, created by Boston-based J. Winsper & Co., targeted the top eight CxO-level titles in the top 150 banks to introduce its bank financial management services to executives who have the power to make the million dollar decision to go with SAP’s solution.
The campaign leveraged the banking industry’s risk-averse nature by identifying top “pain points” which affect bank management and addressed each one of those points specifically by title. In the initial wave of the campaign, each of the 1,000 CxO’s received an initial flat mailer which introduced SAP, not a well known name in banking, identified with that particularly titled executive’s pain points and notified them they would be receiving a second, larger, dimensional mailer. A tele-follow up to the initial mailing showed 48 percent reacted positively to the mailer. The mailer directed recipients to individually customized microsites, each of which addressed the individual’s specific pain points and offered a free industry KPI report. Yes, 1,000 different websites in all.
The initial wave saw six percent of the target access their individual site. Before you scoff at “only” six percent, realize it’s well above typical direct marketing response rates and dramatically higher than campaigns targeted to CxO’s, a demo that traditionally is extremely hard to reach and even harder to get to respond. The campaign will continue in waves with the database of 1,000 continually updated as well as the pain point-specific collection of 1,000 microsites. See all the work here.
