Anne Chalmers heard about her old friend Marsha Wallen’s new job as membership development director at Oceana just after Labor Day 2001. Chalmers called, hoping that she would be invited to help Marsha launch the nonprofit environmental group.
But they didn’t talk until early October, by which time 9/11 and the anthrax scare had destroyed response for many mailers. Chalmers, who runs the Anne Chalmers Marketing Group, got the assignment, but she was terrified.
"Membership launches are difficult at best, but in this case circumstances outside our control could cause a launch failure," she said during a session at the Direct Marketing Association of Washington’s DM Days. "Conventional wisdom is to stay in the mail and stick with lists and packages that had worked in the past, but we didn’t have a past."
The challenge was even more savage given that they had 90 days to get into the mail and win approval for future mailings. And the group’s backers expected to see a 1% response rate.
Wallen tried a new approach, which was known to the team as the "Un-Strategy." Instead of having the marketing people do all the brainstorming, she brought together copywriters (three different ones); her list brokers (from Conrad Direct); and numerous other people, including Oceana staffers.
This approach, which didn’t rely on any one person, was critical to the group’s success because it got the team "out of the traditional client-consultant mode," she said.
With that out of the way, the team went right to work.
To protect the group against disruption from future terrorist attacks, they split a 500,000-piece test mailing into two standalone mailings. Each went to similar lists.
However, one of the three packages missed the print deadline so only two packages were tested in January. That third one was the winner a month later, which may have explained why response to the first mailing was 25% lower than it was to the second one. (Of course, it may also have been due to the mail saturation that existed at that point).
The winning entry was a four-color address-label package written by Lisa Selner and designed by Barbara Davis-Long. It featured a sea otter on the envelope, and included a six-page letter.
As Wallen explained it, the copywriters had the chore of explaining the group. "It’s not just about clean beaches," she said. "I learned that there are some disturbing realities about how humans treat the oceans—cruise ships drop raw sewage, strip miners tear up ancient corals, there are dirty fishing methods being used. It’s a big job to do."
Some quick analysis was done, and the group was able to conduct a rollout mailing in April of roughly 500,000 pieces. Similar mailings went out in June and August.
The result? The group now has 24,000 members, which means that it pulled more than 1% response rate.
The panelists in the double session included Wallen and Chalmers; Jerry Gould and Tom Colwell from Conrad Direct; and Selner and Davis-Long. They all seemed calm considering what they had been through.
