Reed Exhibitions is the world’s leading events organiser – producing over 500 events within 47 industry sectors, across 38 countries. The International Direct Marketing Fair has been running for 30 years – the largest attended and longest running exhibition for the direct marketing industry. The target audience are the strategy makers and decision takers in direct marketing, data, customer management and research.
The objectives of the highly original and creative marketing campaign was to deliver the leading marketing event – where marketing strategy makers and decision takers gather to share techniques, legislation, products and knowledge – on an international stage.
Why the campaign?
At a time when the industry was experiencing great derision regarding junk mail, poor targeting, data privacy, and decreasing levels of response, the campaign aimed to demonstrate the latest and most effective techniques and applications, whilst driving expectations.
Elliott Young and Lorien Unique were briefed with the marketing problem and, working with the client, a highly personalised comic strip concept was developed. This solution provided a range of options for highly creative and original use of personalisation. Once the comic strip concept had been developed, all nine frames were personalised (in addition to the masthead, personalised URL, and gender of the main character).
Solution
Data was perhaps the largest challenge faced by the client. For the personalised campaign to work successfully, it was of paramount importance that the data was clean, all of the fields being used were complete and each field contained the correct information. The clients needed to create two sets of data for the campaign to be a success; 35,000 email contacts and 35,000 direct mail contacts. The International Direct Marketing Fair was in its 30th year, and so the client had direct access to all of the previous visitors and registered attendees.
However, 60% of visitors to the fair are first-time visitors, and so the clients recognised the need to expand and supplement the internal universe of contacts available. A data build brief was issued to several exhibiting partners. Counts and exports then followed, which resulted in a combined database of approximately 40,000 records. These records were deduped against each other and against the internal data, as well as various suppression lists to create a universe of approximately 35,000 unique external records. From a total universe of 65,000 records (internal plus external), the client then had to identify 35,000 contacts that could be emailed and 35,000 contacts that could be mailed.
Also, because the highly personalised emails and direct mail would essentially use the same database, the client had to create one database for email and direct mail purposes. Therefore, only the most relevant job titles were selected and then cleaned so each record had: a salutation (in order to identify the gender), full first name / last name, job tie, very long titles were shortened, incomplete titles were updated, full address details.
All in all, approximately 100,000 contacts were manually checked, cleaned, updated, enhanced and sorted by The IDMF Marketing Manager to make this campaign successful.
This main database was then given to Lorien Unique. Their database and technical team then applied additional fields for personalising each of the various frames of the comic strip and other areas.
Results
From the year of launch the campaign has helped bring in an additional 30,000 unique website users, a 55 per cent year-on-year increase, and resulted in an additional 130,000 web page views, a year-on-year increase of 11 per cent.
Chris Mott, marketing manager of the international direct marketing fair comments: “In my ten years of marketing exhibitions, I have never experienced (or witnessed) the level of feedback that we received from this campaign. Within a few hours of the first email landing, we had received over 100 messages applauding the campaign’s creativity and originality.”
