Delightful direct campaign for the Arts Centre

by Marketing ON 5 March 2013

Campaign: Sally’s First Show

Client: Arts Centre Melbourne

Agency: OgilvyOne Melbourne

Background

Seeing a live performance can change the course of a child’s life and career. But if you live far away from a theatre – or you don’t have much money – it’s hard to get the opportunity to see a show.

To give as many Victorian primary and secondary students access to as many live performances as possible, Arts Centre Melbourne set up the First Call Fund. Since 2008, the First Call Fund has enabled over 15,000 Victorian students (and their 1520 teachers) to experience the performing arts at Arts Centre Melbourne, many for the first time. This inspiring program is funded through the generosity of donors.

Objectives

The objective of the ‘Sally’s First Show’ campaign developed by OgilvyOne Melbourne was to increase donations by about 23% on the previous year, while mailing to a smaller audience.

Strategy

Ogilvy’s insight was simple: the audience (people on Arts Centre Melbourne’s mailing list) want to share their passion for the performing arts with others. So the key message was that a donation to the First Call Fund would bring children closer to the performing arts. It allowed art lovers to feel they were contributing to the arts and inspiring a new generation of patrons and performers. The communication was delivered entirely by mail – a single pack sent to 12,000 recipients.

With five natural disasters in quick succession (floods in Victoria, floods and a cyclone in Queensland, a tsunami in Japan and an earthquake in Christchurch), we recognised that this market was tired of bleak or distressing pleas for help. We took opposite approach and cut through with something positive and upbeat. We knew the target market was passionate about the arts, so we sent them a charming children’s book to dramatise the benefit of the First Call Fund.

Based on a number of real-life case study examples, the buoyant creative told a story of a student, Sally, who has the opportunity to experience a performance at Arts Centre Melbourne for the first time. The book begins with drama-loving Sally holding dances and concerts and puppet shows for herself in her small country town. Having no exposure to the arts, her friends aren’t interested in joining in. But a magical trip to Arts Centre Melbourne changes all that and soon everyone wants to be part of Sally’s act.

Because it didn’t feel like a piece of advertising, this piece thoroughly engaged the recipients. In fact, many of them wrote back to Arts Centre Melbourne praising the book.

Execution

OgilvyOne Melbourne developed a direct mail pack and follow-up postcard to be sent to the Arts Centre Melbourne database to drive donations. The follow-up postcard was sent a week later to those recipients that had not yet donated to the fund. The messaging was tailored to past and new donors.

Envelope

The cover included a personalised thank-you message with the donor’s name where the author’s name would usually appear. A personalised letter was included on the inside cover, and the donation form on the back was pre-populated with the recipient’s information to make it easier for them to donate.

The book itself was a thing of beauty. It involved handcrafted typography, 10 bespoke illustrations and graphic manipulation of textures to really make it feel like a proper children’s book. The paper was slightly textured too, to make it more tactile.

Cover and spread

Results

The pack achieved an 88% increase on the donation increase target and 132% increase on the previous year.

Response rates increased 232% year on year and the average donation amount increased by 106%.

Of course, with a project like this, it’s not just about percentages and dollar figures. Judith Isherwood, chief executive, Arts Centre Melbourne says, “As a result of donations received from this campaign, an extra 3500 children will be able to visit Arts Centre Melbourne and engage with our programs and activities.”

Additionally, the campaign won the following awards:

2011 ADMA Bronze for Flat Mail,
2011 ADMA Silver for Art Direction Craft,
2011 Caples Bronze for Direct Mail, Flat,
2011 Mobius Gold for Copywriting,
2011 Mobius Silver for Art Direction,
2011 Mobius Best of Show for Direct,
2012 ECHO Bronze for Not for Profit, and
2012 ECHO Gold Mailbox Award (USPS).

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ACMA has moved the goal posts on email marketing

by Jodie Sangster ON 25 February 2013

The concept of ‘refer-a-friend’ marketing has been around since… well, probably since marketing began. What better way to promote your goods and services than to get your customer to do it for you. Not only does it spread your message far and wide, it also brings the added weight of customer endorsement.

Look at social media. This is refer-a-friend marketing at its best. Why do we encourage customers to ‘like’ our Facebook page? To spread the word throughout our customers’ networks and encourage their friends to engage with our brand.

Refer-a-friend: genius tactic or marketing 101?

Perhaps now it’s neither.

Refer-a-friend marketing is under the spotlight after the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) issued a formal warning to McDonald’s Australia for sending marketing emails which did not meet the requirements of Australia’s Spam Act.

ACMA found that emails sent via the McDonald’s Happy Meal website using the ‘send to friends’ option had been sent without ensuring the friends’ consent. In addition, the ‘send to friends’ facility didn’t allow recipients to unsubscribe, a breach of the Spam Act.

You may not think that this is an unusual decision. Email refer-a-friend campaigns need to be conducted in a very specific way to ensure they don’t fall afoul of the Spam Act – and many companies get it wrong. But what makes this case unusual is that McDonalds had actually been following the rules as they had been understood and applied for the last 10 years.

So what happened? In a nutshell, it appears that ACMA has moved the goal posts.

Since the Spam Act was adopted in 2003, email refer-a-friend marketing has been conducted under very tight rules. The reason for this is that a company must get the consent of an individual before it sends a marketing email – i.e. the recipient must have either (i) requested it or (ii) has previously purchased or has some other commercial relationship with the company.

This requirement prevents a company from asking its customers to submit email addresses relating to their friends and then using those email addresses to send marketing messages. This is because the company doesn’t have consent to email the friend.

Instead the company must invite their customers to send an email to their friends, thereby relying on the relationship and the consent that exists between the customer and his or her friend.

For the past 10 years this approach has been permissible, providing it was done in a responsible manner. However, ACMA now says this was ‘not good enough.’ Why? Because by providing a webpage to facilitate the sending of the refer-a-friend message, McDonald’s was considered to have caused the email message to be sent by the customer to the friend.

So the next question is: when is a company considered to have ‘caused’ the sending of a marketing email? Unfortunately, that’s for you to guess. There is no definition in the Spam Act regarding what ‘cause’ means and ACMA can’t provide prescriptive guidance on the matter unless they have received a complaint or are making a decision.

So why is this decision important?

Firstly, Australia already has the strictest spam laws in the world. Most countries allow email marketing providing that the recipient is always offered an opportunity to opt out. Australia doesn’t. This is why refer-a-friend was an important mechanism in Australia as it was the only way that permitted email to be used as an acquisition tool.

Secondly, where does the marketer’s responsibility stop? Under ACMA’s new decision, if a marketer provides a ‘refer-a-friend’ facility on its website, it is responsible for proving that the sender has the consent of the end recipient (which is impossible). What if the customer forwards a marketing email received using their Outlook account, or emails a link to a company promotion? The distinction between the two seems incredibly narrow.

The McDonald’s decision really does change the face of refer-a-friend marketing in Australia. Let’s be clear, this is not just a marketing problem. This limits the extent to which businesses and consumers can communicate with each other… and indeed with their friends and family! What a complete absurdity! All this for just one complaint that was raised in relation to the McDonald’s campaign.

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What Australians can expect for Cyber Tuesday

by Kyle Lacy ON 20 November 2012

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are words synonymous with holiday shopping in America. I remember waking up at 2AM or 3AM to go from store to store with my mother, fighting crowds and searching for the best deals.

US consumers are trained to head to the stores the day after Thanksgiving to officially kick-off the holiday shopping season. When the Thanksgiving holiday has passed, we turn to our computers Monday morning for a second dose of shopping – online.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday continue to grow in importance over the years for many retailers in the States and beyond, and similar events, such as ‘Cyber Tuesday’ in Australia, are taking place. There is a shift happening between online and offline purchasing behaviour but we are still witnessing a growing trend for the two days.

What’s being seen in the US?

Increased spending: In August, comScore reported that 2011 Black Friday online spending was up 26% over the 2010 level, compared with a 22% jump in spending on Cyber Monday. Despite slower growth, Cyber Monday remained the biggest single online shopping day of the year, with U.S. internet users spending more than $1.25 billion.

Increased hiring: The National Retail Federation predicts retailers will hire an additional 585,000 to 626,000 seasonal workers.

Increased web traffic: Nearly 123 million people in 2011 said they planned to shop online the Monday after Thanksgiving (National Retail Federation).

How can marketers prepare for big shopping events?

In store

Engaging consumers who are already interacting with your brand is the ultimate win-win. Your physical store provides you a competitive advantage over your ecommerce competitors. Take advantage of the time a consumer spends in your store and promote opportunities to interact with your brand after they walk out the door. Things to do include:

Promote your website URL, email opt-in, SMS messaging programs, social channels, and more within your store, specifically at places where consumers are waiting (e.g. near the check-out),
evaluate if collecting data at check-out is right for your business (via sales clerk, SMS capture, etc). Whether you collect personal data or geographic data, it should lead to more personalised communications – if it doesn’t, you’re just inconveniencing your customer with a lengthier transaction process, and
offer to send in-store receipts to consumers via email. This is a great way to provide value and added convenience to your customers’ shopping experience, plus it gives you an opportunity to gain feedback, promote special offers, and drive web traffic. Not quite ready for digital receipts? Then focus on including a digital call-to-action on your in-store receipts to encourage further brand interaction.

Online

Be respectful of consumers’ time by following these tips:

Make your email opt-in form easy to find on your website,
request only the data that you plan to use – and actually use it! If you request a name and post code, use personalisation and geographic segmentation to make your messages more relevant and engaging, and
communicate the value of what you’re offering up front – make sure your customers know why they should provide you their information.

Cross-channel

Consumers want different things from different channels especially during the holiday shopping season, so make goals and priorities for each while utilising the strengths of one channel to promote another. Tips:

Take advantage of your consumer’s down-time and promote your mobile and social programs across all of your commonly-used mediums – in-store, print, TV, display advertising, etc, and
include an email opt-in form on a Facebook timeline tab and follow the same principles as you do for your website opt-in form.

According to the National Retail Federation in the US, nearly one-fifth of the industry’s annual sales there come directly from sales made in the months of November and December, making it the top consumer spending event of the year. There’s no question on the potential impact of the holiday shopping season and big shopping events like Cyber Tuesday in Australia – it’s a great opportunity for both marketers and consumers, if done well.

Picture yourself here – AAMI promo product direct campaign

by Marketing ON 5 November 2012

Campaign: Rhonda direct marketing campaign

Client: AAMI

Agency: Arid Zone

Background

AAMI, part of the group of insurance companies that fall under the Suncorp umbrella, are creating campaigns to encourage consumers to review and switch their motor insurance as the level of churn in the motor insurance category is known to be high.

They wanted to use the opportunity to cross sell motor insurance from their existing home insurance customers based on the fact that the level of trust in the brand is high, making it likely that customers would switch. AAMI could also leverage the current Rhonda campaign as part of the creative message and her exotic destination as the hook for the major prize.

Suncorp have been working with Arid Zone, a promotional products and brand promotion agency for a number of years and are always looking for ideas that are unique, relevant to their brand and campaign themes.

Rhonda

Objectives

The campaign’s aim was to create a brand promotion that would deliver the key messages ‘Win a $15,000 dream holiday’ and ‘You can relax with AAMI Safe Driver Rewards’, targeting existing home insurance policy holders.

Specifically, objectives included:

gain motor insurance leads,
increase the ratio of multi-policy holders, making the customers more sticky and loyal to the AAMI brand,
provide a positive brand experience, and
collect data on targets’ current motor insurance status.

Strategy

Arid Zone presented AAMI a new direct mail piece, the ‘stereo viewer’, to work with the ‘picture yourself here’ proposition. It works like a mini peep show, allowing recipients to look through the tiny windows to see a three-dimensional image.

The campaign would begin on Monday 11 June and conclude on Wednesday 25 July, and included the following by way of promotion:

win a $15,000 dream holiday thanks to AAMI,
win one of 10 $250 sunglasses vouchers,
relax with up to 15% discount for drivers who don’t claim thanks to AAMI Safe Driver Rewards, and
tell us when your motor insurance expires with another provider and we’ll contact you for a quote.

Viewer

Execution

The audience was sent a mail pack that consisted of a branded letter with a coupon entry slip, stereo viewer and a flyer explaining the promotion and how to participate.

A microsite, luckyaami.com.au, was created as the online entry vehicle.

We asked customers to nominate their renewal date with another provider to go into the draw to win the $15,000 holiday. We also asked them to indicate when their current comprehensive or third party or compulsory third party insurance expires.

Life insurance was also included in the lead-capture form.

Results

The results were measured based on the number of leads generated and how many entries were received through the online entry mechanism and in hard copy by post.

The goal of a 10% response rate was exceeded with the campaign achieving a 14% response rate. This included 4800 entries by coupon and 8922 via the online mechanism.

A better than planned lead rate was also achieved. We were aiming for around a 20% lead rate and in the end achieved around a 25% lead rate.

What marketers can learn from spam

by James Schloeffel ON 20 August 2012

There are around 200 billion spam emails sent every day. Recently, a surprising proportion has landed in my inbox. Perhaps more surprising is that I’ve started reading it. On lonely days when I’m working from home with no-one but the postman to keep me company, it’s comforting to know that Nancy from Florida thinks I’m important and special enough to write to. As she puts it, “Friendship is just like life itself, it has no formal and informal beginning, it comes when you less expected it, it starts at any time, anywhere.” My mates never say anything like that.

But then, when it comes to building relationships, we all have different styles. Brigid from Toronto, for example, was somewhat shy when emailing me out of the blue last week: “I`m aware that this may seem like an unconventional approach to starting a friendship,” she wrote. “Not at all,” I replied. “Randomly emailing people I don’t know is how I’ve made most of my friends”. She then asked me for my credit card details which, while a little forward, is not too dissimilar to how my face-to-face relationships usually unfold. We’ve promised to keep in touch.

Mr Charles Norbet, on the other hand, is more of a thinking-man’s spammer. His subject line is usually “Can I trust you?” which is really quite clever. What he’s done there is flipped the whole scenario around. Because a lot of people would instinctively label him an untrustworthy, despicable con artist. What they haven’t considered is his point of view; can he trust the people he is scamming? Fair play to him for being cautious, he’s no doubt been burnt in the past.

Some spammers come across as quite direct in their language, maybe it’s a cultural thing. Mr Koumba Zak started off his email to me with “READ CAREFULLY”. I’m not sure of the need for shouting – I read all spam carefully – but guess you’ve got to cut through the clutter somehow. Director Umah, meanwhile usually opens with the words, “with due respect” which always makes me think I’ve done something wrong. I generally try to make it up to him by buying whatever he’s got for sale (last week, shuttle buses! Still waiting for delivery).

Lately I’ve noticed that a lot of spammers have names very similar to popular politicians, which is a coincidence. Mr Noble Abbott emails me quite a bit (Tony’s morally righteous brother I suppose) as does Carlos Churchill (Winston’s long lost South American grandson). I can only assume that Nancy Howard, who is in touch quite a bit, is some kind of right-wing wet dream. Either that or John is emailing me under a nom de plume. I suppose he values his privacy.

I usually steer clear of all the Viagra and enlargement pill spam – obviously they’ve accidently emailed the wrong guy, no harm done there. But, interestingly, I’ve recently discovered that they’re not always just about sex. Just yesterday I received a note from a company called Enlargement Supplement Services with a subject heading “Oil prices are about to drop”. Turns out the email itself, once I clicked on it, was entirely about Viagra and enlargement pills, but it was useful to know about the state of the oil price all the same; they didn’t have to pass on that info for free.

Speaking of generosity, I get a lot of mail from people wanting to use my bank account to off-load substantial amounts of cash that they’ve unexpectedly inherited. No wonder those African countries are still so poor – every time they fall into some money they want to give it away to Westerners! Keep it for yourself I tell them! But they are quite religious. And insistent.

Not that I take all spammers seriously. Obviously not. I know a dodgy spam email when I see one. Like when I received an email from myself – as in, from my actual email address – suggesting that I buy a Rolex watch at less than half the retail value. Was it possible that I had actually, in a daze, sat down to write an email to myself telling me to “act fast” and buy a watch that I didn’t need? Not really, no; I haven’t come down in the last shower! I responded saying I wasn’t interested.

So is there anything email marketers can learn from spammers? Well of course. Use emotive language, always have a good offer, try a range of different subject lines, don’t be afraid to ask for the sale and, most of all, make sure your list is full of desperate, lonely people who work from home.

Your marketing quote and niche ad option of the day – 15 May 2012

by Marketing ON 15 May 2012

“The Internet offers an interesting combination of advertising and community – by participating in the community you can become an advertisement for yourself.”

– Walter Jon Williams

Each weekday in May we’ll bring you a niche, alternative or emerging advertising option that perhaps won’t appear on your research and data reports but highlights opportunities that can add reach, impact and value to your marketing and advertising mix. Your niche ad option for 15 May is:

Direct mail and insert advertising

Reach millions of individual households or create local area by-postcode marketing campaigns through direct mail pieces, inserts, postcards, stick-ons, vouchers and coupon advertising. Yellow envelope, for example, is an envelope pack containing a selection of non-competing advertising messages and offers, delivered through Australia Post and offering high in-home penetration and measureable results.

Using Market Research to strengthen DM efforts

by Marketing ON 21 March 2008

Are your campaigns minimising wasted creative and reducing your cost of sales? Good market research should be able to help you with your initial sale and subsequent sales. Sophisticated analysis can then assist you in segmenting your target groups and measuring your ROI.

The value of sales is not just the measurement of revenue, but profitability. You therefore need to take account of not only the initial sale, but the ‘lifetime value’ of the customer and the value of all referral sales too.

In this regard, the work of marketing writer Ray Kordupleski in the area of valuing customers may be of assistance. Kordupleski, author of Mastering Customer Value Brand Management, defines the CVA (Customer Value Added) rate as:

CVA = The average perceived worth of your company’s products and services
The average perceived worth of competitive offers

He says perceived worth is measured by asking customers, considering everything, “Are the products and services worth what you paid for them?” This question and the relative-to-competition CVA ratio are at the heart of the customer value management.

Setting your objectives

Objectives drive strategic choice. Strategy questions are ‘or’ questions: ‘You do this’ or ‘this’. Any ‘and’ question is tactical and isn’t related to ‘big’ objectives, but incremental gain. For example, an objective to attract Generation Ys drives strategy to target people under the age of 29 instead of over the age of 29. An objective related to how a direct mail execution should look is tactical.

In designing any direct marketing campaign you need to take account of immediacy objectives – the advertising and communication need to work quickly and be measurable. The best measurement is the immediate sales generated, and this is easily measurable in an absolute sense. Underneath all of this is the fact you are dealing with individuals, not brand categories.

Understanding those individuals, their lifestyle, family context and needs will ensure that any campaign design is well targeted. Market research is terrific in assisting with segmentation and needs analysis.

Don Pepper and Martha Rogers write about one-to-one marketing, where there is a need to know each customer as an individual and to design processes to meet individual needs, even when dealing with a large customer base.

In a similar vein, strategic database marketer Arthur Hughes says that surveys tell you more personal information about each customer than you could ever get from overlays or models. “Many people like to be asked their opinions or desires, particularly when they think that someone will pay some attention to what they say,” says Hughes.

Not all attributes you communicate will be equal. Some are worth far more to you than others. The trick is finding out which ones are most valuable, because a dollar spent against the most important areas is worth a lot more in sales than a dollar spent on less relevant ones.

Market research uses multi-variate analysis to identify the utility values of each ‘driver’. Prior to this stage, qualitative research can be used to ensure the most relevant attributes are covered in the research and the multi-variate analysis is meaningful.

As well as generating sales, all communication can help build long-term brand salience, and this too is measurable. Measuring the causal impact of the advertising and communication, however, presents more of a challenge.

One of the key benefits of DM is building a longer-term relationship and one of the best ways of conducting a dialogue with customers is the satisfaction survey. According to Hughes, “The information from satisfaction surveys should be stored in a database and used immediately as a part of an overall relationship-building strategy that could include:

making sure the customer purchases a replacement model at the appropriate time
making sure the customer comes back to you for spare parts, service or consumables, or
alerting the customer to other products you sell.

“The strategy needs to be worked out in advance before the survey is even drawn up,” Hughes continues. “Each question should be designed with the strategy objective in mind. The appropriate response to the survey needs to be worked out and put in place and the cost of the survey should be built into a customer lifetime value model.”

The DM process

Let us look at a typical process path to generating successful sales.

Targeting

Identify the target market:

demographically (age, gender, socio-economic status etc.)
geographically
geo-demographically
by needs
by psychographics
by social values
by product and brand usage
by existing attitudes to the product category and client brand, and
by current category and brand experience.

Concept testing

Having developed communication concepts against strategy, work out which of these concepts is likely to be the most effective in generating sales. Which of them best communicates against the ‘drivers’ most relevant to the target group? In testing or pricing alternative DM options, not only do you need to establish which is most effective in generating sales, but you also need to assess why. What lessons have you learned for the design of future marketing campaigns? Ultimately, the best test is parallel in-market testing of alternative options. The more you can pre-empt this with research, the faster you can implement the main program, and the more confident you can be of success.

Modelling

Have you ever looked at modelling those people who respond positively to the offer and using this to pinpoint key opportunities for further DM, partially by CCD and location? Other disciplines use Choice Models and Decision Support Systems (DSSs) to model the value of different offers and the utility of the individual components of those offers. Using these tools, you can look at optimum pricing to generate maximum profits, by looking at the projected sales potential at each pricing level.

Strategy

You can play ‘war games’ where, by reducing cost marginally, you identify incremental sales opportunity (assuming price sensitivity) in terms of:

the number of incremental sales
the value of these sales in absolute terms
the profile of those who come across, with a price decrease, and
where they come from.

The inverse is also possible, where you identify the impact of a price increase on sales (assuming price sensitivity) in terms of:

the number of lost sales
the value of lost sales and the resultant impact on profits, given a higher margin level
the profile of those who leave the brand, with a price increase, and
where they go to.

While this article is aimed at looking at ways to increase your ROI on direct marketing, I believe that intelligent use of research will itself provide an ROI on the efficacy of the DM campaign.

Effectiveness is measured by multiplying strategy by execution. For example, if you have a strategy value of nine out of 10 and an execution value of six out of 10, there is an ‘effectiveness value’ of 9 x 6 = 54.

If you only have a strategy value of four out 10 and execution value of seven out of 10, the ‘effectiveness value’ is 4 x 7 = 28 (half the previous example, even with an improved execution).

Getting your strategy right in what you communicate, where you communicate and to whom you communicate, will increase your success rating potential. Testing alternative executions of your DM against strategy within key target groups will ensure that you get the balance of the equation right.

Building an ongoing relationship

If you are a client, this is the least you deserve and should demand. As a supplier, your professionalism demands that you leverage all tools available to you. The fact that market researchers have not been beating a path to your door, nor been overwhelmed by briefs from you should not be a deterrent.

To conclude, I will borrow the wisdom of Arthur Hughes. According to Hughes, mistakes are often made through failure to understand the difference between market research and database marketing. “Modelling can help in deciding which individuals should receive promotions from the universe of those you could conceivably contact,” he says. “Using modelling, you can reduce the cost of your mailing and still maintain sales. Excessive reliance on modelling will divert marketers from their main objective: building an individual relationship with each customer, rather than spending money on appending external data (which may be inaccurate). It is better to use the same money to survey your customers and ask them why they bought your product, what they would like to see in the way of new products and services and what their plans are for the next year. Once you know these things, you can really build a relationship and your bottom line.”