Finance Directors « Word West

My credit card company sent me a mailer recently. It was so flimsy that I doubted the sales proposition even before I read it, and it wasn’t much of a surprise to find the offer totally valueless. Better to send me nothing than this kind of thing.

On the other hand, WildWest has proven over the years that producing high quality items (with a little imagination mixed in) really does produce good results.

Like? Like the two-part mailing we once developed for a software company. It was aimed at Times Top 250 finance directors – a market we thought was well nigh impossible to reach, let alone get response from. Our mailing had a theme – power and control. The message was that you can’t be powerful unless you are in control (our client’s software promised control over corporate expenditure).

Our pack contained a remote-control car – a bright red Porsche model. We branded and re-packaged it to reflect our message, and we sent it out with one omission. The controller for the car. You didn’t get that unless you sent back the card in the first pack.

There was no catch. No salesman would call (unless requested). No marketing material would be sent.

It wasn’t too much of a surprise to find that we had a 60% response rate within a week. What was more surprising was how many of our target market wanted to meet with our client and to find out more about that software. Our client – previously unknown in this market – suddenly had a hugely valuable sales pipeline.

The same theme is reflected in the work we have been doing with sports marketing agency, SMI.

Sports Media International market sponsorship packages in motorsport, sailing and soccer, and the really high quality marketing packs that we have developed for their clients (at Citroen Sport and Mahindra Racing) are both appropriate and respected. So too, with the brand-building photo-books which we produce for Barclays and their work with the Barclays Premier League.

The message is simple. If you have a high-quality product, you need high-quality materials to back it up. And of course, there’s no one better to meet those demands than WildWest design.

70% response? Impossible! (or not?)

This direct marketing campaign happened when B2B eCommerce was the really sexy thing in IT.

Everyone was talking about it, and Ariba were the hot company within this particular technology.

The problem was that Ariba wanted to sell to big companies (Times Top 200, typically), their software was a big ticket item (for large companies it would have been a fairly substantial investment) and Ariba were new to the UK. They also wanted to talk at a high level (Finance Director).

Over a period, we jointly devised the idea of a remote-control car, branded and boxed, and a theme – ‘You can’t have power without control’ – to link the creative to the Ariba product. (‘Control your spending, get better value from every pound you spend’).

WildWest sourced the car via a German company who manufactured in Hong Kong. We sent artwork for them to brand the car, which included the Ariba phone no. We thought we would have done a job even if we got the car onto an office shelf.

The key idea though, (the ‘sting’, if you like) was that the recipient didn’t get the controller for the car until he returned a card – didn’t have to do anything else, though there were options to sign up for a seminar or request a meeting. The controller was similarly packaged and as soon as the card came back, it was sent off.

All this happened pre-Christmas (November) and there was a fantastic response – something like 60% in three days! There was telephone follow up just in case anyone was embarassed or had guidelines that didn’t allow them to accept (we would then send a donation to charity on their behalf). That allowed us to check whether the message had got across, if they remembered Ariba and what business they were in – all were great numbers.

We sent out about 240 of the cars. Final response was over 70%.

It wasn’t cheap. The whole exercise cost about 45k, but that was about the price of a dps in the FT – which was one of the other options considered.

Best of all was that Ariba got six sales direct from the campaign which paid for itself many times over.

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