All Aboard: How to Get a Greater Return from Your Direct Mail.- Issue: 2001 Qtr 4
Want to see a 10 percent return on your next high-premium direct mail campaign? To pick up some pointers, take a look at the All Aboard campaign created by Miller Brooks and Aprimo, Incorporated.
Aprimo’s flagship product, Aprimo Marketing, consists of various unique software applications that can all be integrated on a single marketing platform. To demonstrate the flexibility and power that Aprimo Marketing provides, the campaign needed a concept that could highlight the modular structure of the applications, while emphasizing the fact that they all work together as a unit.
A train. Perfect! The literature developed by Miller Brooks used the concept of train cars to call attention to each of the Aprimo applications. Aprimo, Incorporated scheduled drops of two cars and two pieces of BRIO® train track to each company on their carefully developed list.
A great deal of the success of the All Aboard campaign can be attributed to the use of clean data. Aprimo, Incorporated employs a team that does nothing but verify data. After the desirable parameters for a particular campaign are determined, the data team calls each company that fits the parameters, and asks for the name and contact information for the Chief Marketing Officer. Using this intensive but ultimately very rewarding process, Aprimo, Incorporated delivered over 4000 trains. Less than 20 were returned as undeliverable. That’s less than one half of one percent.
The All Aboard mailings were dropped using carefully planned schedules. The brochure insert had a call to action for the recipient to go to a specific URL on Aprimo’s web site and register for an additional 6 pieces of track to make a complete closed-loop track set. The fulfillment was managed by Aprimo Marketing’s Web Response Manager. If there was not a response within 10 days of the mailing, the Inside Sales department at Aprimo called the recipient to confirm delivery and request a face-to-face sales appointment. In fact, Inside Sales called each recipient no less than five times, attempting to get an appointment. The initial mailing and each subsequent call or other contact was carefully tracked using the Aprimo Marketing software application which enabled Aprimo team members to manage the data on each prospect in a concise, centralized manner.
Using these methods, Aprimo, Incorporated secured more than 400 sales appointments with high-level marketing executives, for a return rate of 10 percent.
Here’s what happened next: the day after a scheduled appointment, the Aprimo sales executive received a customized e-mail survey, asking how the call went. If he or she neglected to complete and return it within three business days, an e-mail was automatically sent to the Aprimo VP of Sales and the CEO, notifying them that the sales executive has yet to rate the quality of the appointment. (The data from the surveys helps establish exactly how good the prospects are — data that can be important for future campaigns.)
Wondering what happened to the rest of the track for the train? Well, if a prospect was lucky (or smart) enough to make an appointment with an Aprimo sales executive, he or she collected a full track kit. Talk to Aprimo enough, and they’d have a track that comes full circle
Just goes to show what you can accomplish when you have good clean data and a great concept.
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