SUMMARY
We love the creative samples and results data from this Case Study — including direct postal mail, HTML email and email newsletter sponsorships. Plus, if you’ve wondered how to create a landing page that gets insanely high submission rates from qualified prospects, here are notes and a useful vendor hotlink. Good news, the tactic is fairly low-cost too:

CHALLENGE
It’s nearing the end of fourth quarter and your prospects have left-over budget to burn. How can you reach into their pockets and get your company’s share?

Katherine Van Diepen, Anritsu’s Director of Marketing Communications, knew she was incredibly lucky because their handheld spectrum analyzer product line “has got a cult following” among engineers.

That said, any b-to-b campaign scheduled to drop November 15th has an uphill battle what with the holidays, office parties, vacations, and year-end activities. Most b-to-b marketers won’t touch any mail date past November 1st with a ten foot pole if they can help it.

But Van Diepen had no choice. She had to drop a major promotion with high enough impact so it cut through the clutter.

CAMPAIGN
First, working with the sales department, the marketing team defined precisely what a truly qualified lead looked like in this marketplace. What job title? What purchase plans? etc.

Then, the marketing team pulled out all the stops, using five specific high-impact tactics to get the maximum number of these qualified leads to respond before year-end.

Tactic #1. Use best lists in multiple media

Instead of relying on one list, or one medium alone, the team researched the entire breadth of their options and selected the very best, including:

• House lists of past inquiries
• Direct postal mail list rentals from the two top trade magazines in the field, selecting only the names who’d checked the past year’s subscription qualification cards saying they were planning to purchase spectrum test equipment.
• A polybag insert purchase (where your printed marketing piece, weighing under one ounce, is placed in a plastic bag with the latest issue of a trade magazine) from a third relevant trade journal. (Van Diepen notes that the insert was far less expensive than postage to the list would have been; plus, the increased print run for the insert made her other DM campaign printing cost-per-piece lower overall.)
• HTML email blast to a highly relevant list
• Sponsorship ad at the top of a highly relevant third party email newsletter Tactic #2. Creative elements to increase response All of the campaigns shared the same drop date (as much as possible) to help responses. The creative elements remained identical across campaign creative as well, to boost responses among prospects who might see more than one. (Link to samples below.)

Creative elements included:

• A photo of an engineer on site that prospects would identify with
• A hero shot (picture) of the product itself
• A ‘Win a Free iPod’ sweeps offer for registrants
• Multiple calls to action throughout the creative, front, back, top, bottom… etc.

Plus, cleverest of all, the marketing team created personalized URLs for the direct mail campaign by feeding the lists to their landing page services firm which created a personal URL for each name, such as: www.anritsu.com/spectrum/samplenamehere (not a working link)

If two people had the same name, the firm created two different URLs using a number such as samplename7 and samplename8.

Tactic #3. Pre-fill landing page form when possible

The landing page services team also pre-filled the registration forms on those personal landing pages as much as possible. So anyone going to their personal page would see the street address already filled in on the form.

Tactic #4. Thank you page with useful links

The marketing team decided the thank-you page that appeared after prospects submitted their forms was prime real estate to start the sales process right away.

So instead of just saying “thank you,” the page included another hero shot of the product, plus short benefit copy (“Weighs 80% less. Costs 40% less. Delivers 100% of the performance you need…”) and, three handy links for more info:

- Download the product brochure – Download the must-have Wireless Reference guide – Access the product page

Van Diepen explains, “The reason they are visiting the site is for some kind of instant gratification. So, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t start looking at the product right away.”

Tactic #5. Don’t forget alternate response methods

You can’t count on everyone who gets a postal mailing to respond online. In fact multiple b-to-b marketers have told us its mission critical to provide phone numbers and printed reply cards in addition to URLs. Not only are some prospects not near computers (especially engineers in the field), but some may just prefer traditional response mediums.

Just as they had pre-filled online response forms whenever possible, the marketing team also had the business reply cards (BRCs) in the postal direct mail package pre-filled with the recipient’s name and address.

It costs a bit more for extra lasering and a two-way match with the carrier (envelope), but the team felt increased response rates would make the investment pay off.

RESULTS
86.8% of direct mail respondents who went to their personalized URL landing pages completed and submitted their forms. That’s a conversion rate of roughly five to seven times higher than average. So, yes, if you can pre-populate a reply form with basic information to save a prospect typing, you’ll get a response rate that rocks.

More useful data from the campaign:

• 4.8% of DM recipients went online to their personalized URLs, proving nothing’s more enticing than your own name.
• An additional 5.2% of DM recipients mailed back their pre-filled BRC cards, proving you should never assume everyone wants to respond online.
• The HTML email got a 38.8% open rate. 5.5% of the opens clicked through to the landing page. This page was identical in all aspects to the DM landing page except none of the fields were pre-filled. The conversion rate from visitor to form submission dropped to 22%.
• Email newsletter sponsorship results ranged from .8% click rate with a 33% conversion rate to .5% click rate with a 24% conversion rate depending on how targeted the list was.
• The polybag insert was a moderate success with .8% of recipients going online and .4% replying via the BRC. Those who went online converted at a 60% rate — very high, but not nearly as high as the DM recipients who got pre-filled forms.

Although the polybag cost per piece was far cheaper than the direct mail campaign, the cost per resulting lead was four times higher. Van Diepen suspects this is mainly because the list wasn’t segmented for the polybag. It went to all subscribers instead of just a targeted selection.

It’s a good lesson to remember: super-cheap cost per thousand media can wind up being pretty expensive in the long run.

One last note on polybags – Van Diepen is still getting occasional responses from this mailing more than 120 days out. It’s a longer-lived medium than most.

- Final interesting factoid: Van Diepen didn’t require any of the qualification questions on her online response form to be filled out for submission. She figured that was more polite than demanding respondents answer questions about their purchase plans. Even so, only 3% of total submissions neglected to answer those questions.

Useful links related to this article:

Creative samples from Anritsu’s year-end campaign, including the personalized landing page:

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/anritsu/study.html

SUMMARY: We loved this campaign so much that we’ve been badgering the poor marketers at Hewlett Packard to let us write a Case Study since June. They caved in this week, so here you go.

HP tested this campaign to see if they could replace their fat printed catalog with an online-only version. The results were unexpectedly good. (By the way, if you’re a copywriter, you may pick up some good tips from the samples.)
CHALLENGE

Every year, HP Education Services used to print and mail out a fat catalog of courses for IT pros in the US and Canada.

The catalogs were packed with details on dozens of courses, each with various electives and levels, all available at different times at 13 different locations. The courses could cost thousands, so potential students needed enough information to pick the best option, and also to get their bosses’ sign-off for the expense.

As the cost of printing and mailing the catalog mounted year after year, HP marketers began to wonder if they should test email and Web alternatives.

But how can you get such a huge amount of information across in an email?

Plus, Web campaigns don’t have the staying power that print catalogs do. An email campaign may last a week or two, a catalog can last for months. Any Web response would have to be incredible to make up for the longer lifetime of print.

By January 2002, Suzanne Eschel, then HP Education Services’ Marketing Manager, was stick between a rock and a hard place. Her budget was reduced and due to the recession, catalog responses had been lowering for some time. She had to test something dramatically new.

CAMPAIGN

Eschel had two cards in her favor – she had a database of thousands of past course takers, and she had a great online course catalog at HP.com. She just had to figure out the best way to drive those customers to the site — and get them excited about taking a course right away instead of waiting for someday.

What do people care about the most? Themselves. Eschel decided to make the campaign intensely personal. Here’s how it worked:

Step #1: Send out a personalized message

This clever campaign (see samples below) went way beyond just sticking the customer’s name in the creative. Messages were personalized in five ways:

• Instead of talking about HP’s classes in general, the creative recommended just one single course to the recipient, carefully selected to meet their individual needs based on the courses they’d taken before.
• The course location was chosen to be the one nearest that customer’s office.
• The copy focused on personal, career-related benefits and used the words “you” and “your” repeatedly.
• The customer’s first name was in the headline
• The customer’s first and last name were in the URL of the Web page they were directed toward. Sample (sample pURL doesn’t work): http://www.hp-ITclasses.com/sarah.callahan

Eschel wasn’t sure whether old fashioned print mail or email would work the best for this creative. Luckily she didn’t have to choose. HP’s database only had correct emails plus permission to mail about half the names.

So, she sent the names with correct emails an HTML emailed promo and sent the others an oversized printed postcard in the regular mail. Creative and copy for both matched as much as possible to keep the test results accurate.

Aside from personalization, the creative was notable for its skimpy copy. The copy was very brief, to the point and in large easy-to-skim typeface. A complete opposite from the thick, dense catalogs of the past that had to carry the entire communications burden on their shoulders.

Step #2: Clicks reach a personalized landing page

You guessed it — when customers typed in their personal HP Web page address, they wound up on a personalized landing page.

Again, the creative rules were followed — the customer’s name was in the headline, the offer was specifically for a single course, and the copy was brief in large typeface. In fact, no typeface was smaller than 12 pixels. Plus, the landing page did not require scrolling to view completely.

The largest and clearest response device was a big Register Now button at the lower right corner — exactly where your mouse cursor might be sitting naturally.

However, if the customer wanted to look into alternatives to the suggested course, they could easily click on one of the navigation buttons in secondary positions at the bottom of the screen. The buttons’ size and placement complemented the Register Now button instead of conflicting with it.

When the campaign launched, Eschel forecast a 1-3% response rate of people going to their personal landing page, and that then 3% of these page visitors would click through again to either register immediately or surf HP’s other offerings.

RESULTS

Eschel’s forecasts were completely wrong and she’s never been happier. 8.7% of print postcard recipients went to their personal landing pages. Then, an astonishing 63% of these visitors clicked yet again to either register or surf other course options at HP’s main education site.

Print postcard recipients were slightly more likely at 65% clicks, than email recipients at 61% clicks, to make it through to the next site.

Overall, of the people who clicked through to the next site, 31% converted into purchasing courses.

Interested in copying this tactic yourself? Eschel advises, “You really need to have access to good customer data. You need to be able to have a good targeted offer that’s relevant to that group, and you really should have a way to track it so you can make some decisions about it afterwards.”

Useful links related to this story:

Samples of HP’s DM, email and landing pages:

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/hp/ad.html