What Went Wrong?
Deborah Gallagher isn’t convinced that e-mail works for prospecting. But she’s willing to give it another chance.
The MIT Sloan Management Review’s director of circulation and marketing recently tested an outbound e-mail campaign in which the creative seems to have worked like gangbusters, but the leads aren’t converting.
At first glance the landing page looks to blame. However, as Gallagher points out, there are other possible culprits.
First, the creative: Mothers of Invention, a boutique agency in Maynard, MA, decided to play off the fact that the MIT Sloan Management Review is an elite business publication that doesn’t publish puff pieces.
“This is a serious journal for serious people,” says Robert Rosenthal, Mothers of Invention’s president. “There are no humor articles, no lifestyle pieces, none of that stuff. It’s for managers who are serious about the art and science of management.”
The creative depicted a male model and the headline “Sexiest Manager Alive” opposite the following copy: “What doesn’t go into our magazine is as important as what does.”
The campaign (which can be viewed at http://themothersofinvention.com/projects/mit/) then offered recipients a free trial issue.
At her list broker’s recommendation, Gallagher agreed to test 5,000 names of purported decision-makers from e-Rewards.com. The broker said e-Rewards had been working for a competitor, according to Gallagher.
“This was our first test of an outside e-mail list,” she says. “We’ve been doing e-mail marketing to an internal list. I had looked off and on at using e-mail for prospecting but I never did, because I couldn’t find anyone who said it worked for them.”
The result was a 29% clickthrough-to-open rate, Rosenthal says. “The concept really resonated.”
Adds Gallagher: “That e-mail really got people to click.” But it didn’t get them to convert.
“E-mail worked to a point, but it didn’t get us a lot of customers,” she says. “[So,] we are not yet sold on e-mail as a prospecting vehicle. We see promise because the front end worked so well. This e-mail was very well received and it got a great clickthrough rate, but then there was a substantial falloff.”
One obstacle may be the subscription price: $89 a year for four issues. “These people [on e-Rewards’ list] may have been looking for something for free,”Gallagher says.
Regardless, she doesn’t plan to get anyone to convert by discounting. “We’re not about lowering our prices. We need to figure out what we need to do to get them to convert. If we’re going to put this price in front of people, we need to do a better job of persuading them that this publication has value.”
She also feels the creative might have been too clever. “There may be a disconnect between what you see [in the creative] and what you see in our publication. One thought is that when people click, they should see some sort of continuation of the creative proposition.”
As a result, Gallagher intends to have the landing page redone, among other things. “We’re talking now about what that landing page should be like. We have so many options now; it could be a video. We don’t want to scare people away, but we need to be really persuasive.”
Though Gallagher is concerned that the universe of e-mail addresses available to her publication for prospecting may be extremely limited, she believes that perfecting the landing page won’t be a wasted effort. “That could help our business in a bunch of other areas, such as paid search.”
As for the e-mail campaign, Rosenthal says: “We’re on the proverbial 20-yard line. Now we’ve got to figure out how to push the ball over the goal line.”
