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Massive response to online and print advertisements boosts new customer acquisition efforts
Textbooks tell marketers that the most effective way to generate response from promotions is to offer potential customers some special value that they can only get by responding promptly.
That’s the theory – and a campaign devised by TKO and its client Parallel Systems proved it beyond doubt as waves of customers telephoned in to the company to redeem an offer promoted in a series of small advertisements.
The business case
Parallel Systems, the UK’s exclusive authorized reseller for the OrCAD and Allegro lines of PCB design tools from Cadence, had strong evidence for believing that there was an opportunity to gain new business from engineers familiar with OrCAD. Before Cadence acquired OrCAD, it had suffered from a lack of marketing investment, and it was common to hear UK circuit board designers express the belief that OrCAD had gone out of business.
At the same time, OrCAD is an excellent suite of tools, and for many engineers it is the first tool they use when they are learning how to lay out a board. Parallel Systems believed that there was a large community of board designers in the UK either using expired versions of the software, or using a competitor’s tool unwillingly, in the belief that OrCAD was no longer properly supported.
It was one thing to sense this audience existed. It was another to turn it into sales of OrCAD licences. To make new sales to these engineers, Parallel Systems needed them to make contact with it – and this was where the idea of offering special value came in.
A valuable, exclusive offer gains response from readers
Parallel Systems and TKO realized that the way to gain response from enthusiastic users and would-be users of OrCAD was to offer them something that would help them use OrCAD better. From this insight came the offer: a free book, Complete PCB Design Using OrCAD, the definitive guide to designing better board layouts using OrCAD, normally sold for more than £30.
Two key elements of TKO’s execution were then crucial to the successful outcome of the campaign: media selection and the creative concept.
TKO placed its direct-response advertisements in New Electronics. This popular title is aimed squarely at a design engineering audience. It also benefits from a very well managed and reliable circulation. Media buyers know what they are getting when they spend advertising dollars on New Electronics.
Creatively, the key decision was to focus on the offer: the advertisement avoided promoting Parallel Systems, Cadence or even OrCAD itself, because the target audience was already convinced of the value of OrCAD.
Instead, the advertisement concentrated solely on communicating the value of the offer – the contents of the book, and the means of obtaining it free. (TKO took this approach in order to maximize response, but it also had the effect of allowing Parallel Systems to run small quarter-page advertisements. This meant that it could obtain more insertions with its budget than would have been possible with a more wasteful use of advertising space.)
Parallel Systems took the decision that the only way to claim a free book was by telephoning its sales office. While respondents typically prefer responding online or by post, in order to avoid contact with a sales person, Parallel Systems only wanted to hear from those with a serious current interest in OrCAD – and these engineers would not be deterred by having to make a telephone call.
Implementing a telephone response mechanism also gave Parallel Systems the opportunity to interact with each respondent – in itself a valuable sales opening.
A flood of responses
More than 150 circuit board designers telephoned Parallel Systems to claim a free book during the course of the campaign – a phenomenal response in the context of the size of the UK population of board layout engineers. The telephone conversations between these respondents and Parallel Systems’ sales people confirmed the assumption that there was a population of design engineers who were keen to use OrCAD, but were not currently using it for a variety of reasons.
The campaign earned an excellent return on investment thanks to the combination of the very high response rate and the economical use of advertising space.
"I could not have been more delighted with the results that we got from the free book offer campaign – it opened up a huge section of the UK population of board designers to us, and gave us many opportunities to bring UK engineers back to the OrCAD fold."
David Blunt
Managing Director of Parallel Systems