Cisco Starts Major DM Effort
DESPITE THE FALTERING ECONOMY and corporate reluctance to invest in equipment, Cisco Systems is under way with a $100,000 multimedia push to generate leads for its optical online data transmission system.
And there’s reason to think it will work. In September 2000, the San Jose, CA-based company pulled a 55% response rate and sold $2.2 million worth of such systems with a similar $186,000 campaign, said marketing program manager Susan Chiu. The ROI was 1,200%.
The new initiative, which started late last year, targets CEOs, technical staffers and managers at large corporate customers like AT&T, Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo.
E-mails, which offered a technical book as a premium, were sent to about 40,000 opt-in users on Cisco’s 200,000-name house database. Most were people who bought or expressed interest in optical data products.
Cisco also sent a 6-inch-by-11-inch three-part self-mailer to CEOs, marketing managers and non-technical people because its surveys indicated these people preferred traditional mail, said Chiu.
The purpose of both efforts was to get prospects to request information and qualify themselves as leads.
That may be just the beginning. Cisco plans to analyze the campaign’s results and possibly expand it to names from outside lists such as Dun & Bradstreet, Harte-Hanks and Tech Republic (www.techrepublic.com), an informational Web site frequented by networking professionals.
Chiu said Harte-Hanks’ lists are useful because they can indicate whether prospects own competitive products. And D&B’s files could provide data regarding purchasing behavior since the firm offers predictive modeling services.
Cisco’s optical data transmission systems cost from $200,000 to several million dollars depending on such variables as a company’s size and its computer infrastructure.
Once Cisco gets leads from these campaigns, it passes them on to Boston-based public relations agency TechMarcom for further qualification as to when a company will be ready to buy and how much it’ll be willing to spend. Cisco’s field sales force then gets those leads and qualifies them even further before calling on them.
Chiu conceded that the conversion rate of the latest effort might not equal the previous one. But she believes it could come close, especially if firms decide to update their data transmission equipment.
