High-Tech Product, Old-Tech Marketing
Even in a softening economy, old-fashioned direct mail efforts can pay off for high-tech firms.
At a time when a lot of companies are said to be pulling back from major capital investments, XML technology developer Software AG of Darmstadt, Germany got a 3.4% response rate and six-figure sales leads from a targeted promotional mailing.
Earlier this year the firm sent out 36,000 letters announcing a teleconference seminar about its new information dissemination technology based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML), a format for encoding data in Web documents.
The mailing was aimed at decision-makers from companies in 18 different industries, whose names were culled from lists of subscribers to Application Trends, CIO and Beyond Computing magazines and XML Journal. Other names were gathered from recent trade shows.
The mailing yielded 1,219 qualified leads. Of this group 633 actually took part in the teleconference, from which came 330 sales appointments, says Jerry Rendich, vice president and co-owner of BB&R Marketing Inc., Software AG’s Alexandria, VA-based direct response agency.
Rendich projects sales of about $200,000 based on the assumption that 10% of the 330 appointments will turn into sales.
All seminar registrants were immediately acknowledged by e-mail. One week before the conference, they received an animated flash reminder and the day before the conference an e-mail prompt. To further qualify them, registrants were asked to fill out a questionnaire to determine their interest in the product and their time frame for purchase.
Software AG tested but put the kibosh on telemarketing because of low response, concedes Rendich.
The company sent out several versions of the initial mailings based on segmentation criteria. One letter on plain white 8-1/2-by-11-inch paper, signed by Software AG president Alf Goebel, stated in part:
