Giving Distributors a Turnkey Campaign

What if you wanted to give money away, and nobody wanted it? That was Mobile School Solutions’ (MSS’s) challenge. The company provides PDA solutions for the education market.

MSS sells exclusively through channel partners. To increase revenue, it provided partners with market development funds that could be used for direct marketing lead generation. It quickly became evident, there were no takers for the money. The partners didn’t have the time, know-how, or resources to execute an outbound campaign.

MSS contacted InSight, a California-based advertising and direct marketing agency, to learn how to increase channel revenue. InSight’s Creative Director Jeff Hicks recalls how the agency quickly realized a turnkey campaign was the only answer that made sense. To personalize messages for each partner — without breaking MSS’s budget — the campaign had to be an email that leveraged dynamic insert technology.

A universal email was developed to provide all partners with the same benefit messaging, feature description, and call to action (attend a Web seminar). Click here to view the message, then:

1. Click on the email itself to enlarge the image.
2. On the next screen, follow directions in the instruction box to view the campaign elements. Observe the zones where content was dynamically inserted.
3. Close the pop-up window, then go to page eight to view the comprehensive, real-time campaign reporting provided for this campaign.

Zones integrated into each email accepted content unique to each partner, such as logo, offer, and special announcements. Zones were also created to personalize the message for each recipient, including the salutation and a reference to the software platform used by his school. Content unique to each partner was dynamically inserted into zones at the time of mailing.

All the partners had to do was provide their email lists, artwork, and special announcements. Then, they could sit back and watch the leads roll in. Since their email lists went through a trusted third party, database privacy was assured.

The results: a 15 percent response and 60 percent conversion.

We don’t know how well MSS PDAs actually work compared with the competition’s. But after reading the copy about how handhelds can improve school safety, Karen’s ready to start a fundraising campaign to get PDAs into her kids’ school. She’s working on a catchy tagline, like “PDAs from the PTA.”

Let’s sharpen our pencils and become better e-marketers! Send your case studies to Karen.