The idea behind the campaign is to convince agency staff that digital should not replace direct mail, but that the two work best alongside each other. The idea is expressed through a well-executed, animated character called Mr Complete. It’s a highly targeted, and I suspect very high cost, campaign. I received two DM pieces one two-dimensional and one three-dimensional (as did eight other people in our office) and my specific domain is http://richard.bush.meetmrcomplete.com. The Evaluator is still relevant for a campaign site because it is or at least should be designed to move the user down a purchase funnel in the same way a main site is.
It’s worth focusing on a number of key scores. The irony is, ‘Meetmrcomplete’ scores poorly in areas where most sites do well, and excels where others fail. This illustrates the change in mindset needed. We need to apply some of the thinking we use on our main sites to campaign sites and vice versa.
Its Identity score is one of the worst scores ever. Why? Because the campaign is unbranded and it’s only as you go through the journey you realise it’s from Royal Mail. The mailer itself was also unbranded (and more effective for it) so it would have been wrong to lead with Royal Mail messaging. It would benefit from some explanation about what the site is for, who it’s for and what people will gain from visiting. This would also have helped the SEO score.
The second area is Interest. Ordinarily, this is one of the most important scores as it rates how effective the site is in getting you considered as a supplier. Where it fails here is that you don’t really know what it is they want to be considered for if anything.
On to two good points firstly Interaction. Part of the reason I love this site is that it is using most of the strengths of digital media to deliver a great brand experience (albeit one that is ironically unbranded) and is beautifully executed. The intrigue gets you interacting and this keeps you going throughout the site. It uses personalisation in an effective, non-gratuitous way and it also makes you smile.
The second good score is Integration. However, it could be much better integrated and to explain why we need to look at the Search results. The site scored 8.5 per cent, which serves to illustrate that unless SEO is planned, we are missing an opportunity. A little unfair considering the site wasn’t meant to be found via Google, but to increase its score all it had to do was expand the content, set up tags and metatags, work harder on internal links and invest time establishing external links. Focusing on keywords; ‘digital marketing’, ‘direct marketing’ and ‘integration’ would give them a reasonable position on the main search engines and additional traffic at little cost.
I’ve no doubt the response will be, It doesn’t need to be optimised for search, it’s a direct mail response site and it requires a user name. But that would be missing the point. If we have enough to say in a campaign that we need to build a site to handle responses from DM then it follows that the same content could be of interest to others. So why not add more content, optimise it for search and turn it from a tactical cost to a strategic asset?
I still like this campaign but it’s not an award winner. It’s too focused, it limits the user and it’s not visible to anybody except the selected few.
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Royal Mail introduces ‘Mr Complete’ – 01-11-07
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