A Direct Marketing Agency - Helping Brands Acquire and Retain Customers

Ovation recently developed and executed a multichannel marketing campaign to launch a new product for one of our clients. The goals of the campaign were to create awareness for the new product and generate leads for the sales force. We used a number of tactics, such as paid search, trade advertising and e-mail to drive traffic to a microsite. Once a visitor came to the site, we tracked a number of actions – whether they downloaded a brochure, requested a sample or signed up to receive e-mail. As expected, nearly 100 percent of all leads coming to the site via paid search or trade advertising were new leads. In other words, they were not already in the client's database. Search generated the most visits to the site (49%) but the least number of sample requests (10%), whereas the trade advertising campaign generated approximately 29% of the site visits and 26% of the sample requests.

But the surprising thing we found was that by e-mailing their house file, we were able to achieve 45 percent more new leads. This shows the power of the e-mail list and how it is virally passed to colleagues within the company to generate new leads. We also tested various outside trade publication and association lists. Overall, e-mail was the most effective in producing sample requests. Twenty-two percent of the site visits and 64% of all samples requested were from people receiving an e-mail.