How a B2B Tech Company Generated 650% ROI with a Retro-Cool Direct Mail Campaign
“We have a pretty small market at Intronis, it’s manage service providers, mainly in North America,” said Richard Delahaye, Senior Director of Marketing, Intronis in his interview at the MarketingSherpa Media Center at Summit 2016.
He explained that the sales staff wasn’t able to get many conversations going from that group with traditional methods like phone calls and emails. They needed something special to differentiate them from all the other phone calls and emails their prospects were likely getting.
Inspiration came from an old school method: a direct mail campaign.
Delahaye and his team were told to think big, but also keep the customer in mind. So after one idea – which unsurprisingly never came to fruition – to give a car away with every purchase was vetoed, he decided to look for a tech gadget that would especially appeal to their customer base.
“I landed on possibly the oldest, but maybe the greatest tech gadget of all time. Which is, you can now get an Atari game console for about 30 bucks, so that became the core piece of the campaign,” he said.
Customers would receive a box with the Atari, with a note on top that encourages them to “open up for some office fun, courtesy of Intronis … unfortunately, not all technology is this retro-cool. You need to upgrade your cloud service storage.”
This has been “a really remarkable campaign,” according to Aaron Dun, former CMO, Intronis, and has been running for almost two years.
In the early days, he added, they were seeing stunning conversion rates with almost 50% of people taking the call-to-action, which he attributes to the relevance of the offering to customers.
“Our target market … are mostly men between the age of 30 and 50, and this Atari console really resonated with them,” he said.
Nearly two years later, they’re still trending at a 35% conversion rate, and a 650% ROI.
One of the most important elements, of course?
“It’s really cost efficient for us,” he said. “When we look at our metrics in terms of what we can spend per dollar of new bookings, it is about 30% of our target.”
One of the best anecdotal stories Dun had to add was when he was speaking to a prospect at a conference, who admitted to dodging Intronis’ sales attempts for a year, but “when you sent me that Atari, I immediately called you back.”
To see Intronis’ full Summit 2016 presentation, please view the article published this week.
To see presentations live, please explore MarketingSherpa Summit 2017, which will be held April 10-13 at the Aria Las Vegas.
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Categories: B2B Marketing b2b, customer-centric, direct mail, MarketingSherpa Summit 2016, Media Center, video
