Beanstalk Achieves Great Response Rate with Offset Mailing

In today’s 1:1 printing world, it seems that there is endless competition to outdo one another in response rates. Did you receive 18, 22, 30 percent or more? If you didn’t get a double-digit response rate, you might feel that your campaign is lagging behind the pack.

But the fact is, you don’t need double-digit response rates to have a successful marketing campaign. In fact, you don’t even need to use 100 percent digital print! Just ask Just Fresh Restaurants.

Just Fresh and Donato’s Pizza were opening new stores in McKee Farms Shopping Center in Matthews, N.C. Both are owned by the same parent company, so they teamed up to co-brand a campaign to drive consumer traffic.

In the past, Just Fresh had tried to promote new store openings by using newspaper inserts, but it had been disappointed with the results. For this effort, it contracted with Beanstalk Data, a company that specializes in marketing automation, response tracking and data-driven messaging; and Integraphx, Beanstalk’s sister printing firm and marketing services provider, to try something new—an integrated print-to-Web campaign.

The Challenge

The goal of the project was to create direct mail pieces to drive consumer traffic to a Beanstalk Data Web page branded for Just Fresh and Donato’s (www.justfreshdeals.com and www.donatosdeals.com), respectively, and drive in-store traffic and sales.

In any print-to-Web campaign, one of the biggest challenges is motivating recipients to respond. The e-mail or direct mail piece isn’t meant to stand alone. It’s meant to drive traffic to the main source of marketing muscle, the landing page. This means finding the right incentive to motivate people to type in that URL or personalized URL and view the message.

In this case, the answer to the “motivation factor” was high-value coupons for free food.

The Solution

Beanstalk Data created three unique direct mail pieces that were mailed to households within a 2.7-mile radius of the new stores. This was a saturation mailing, so it went to all of the households within that radius—all 14,000 of them—postal sorted to achieve the lowest mailing rates. A new mailer went out every two weeks featuring different menu items.

To capture response rates, each direct mailer included a unique code. Recipients had to enter this code and their e-mail address in order to receive the coupons. Using proprietary software, Beanstalk Data was able to cross-reference contact data and match it with each recipient’s unique code. Once this information was gathered, the customer was able to print out the coupons to bring into the stores.

Because the campaign also gathered e-mail addresses, Beanstalk Data was able to later implement a regular e-mail blast to the direct mail responders at a much reduced cost of additional postcard mailings.

Why Not Personalized URLs?

When I first read about this campaign, I wondered, why didn’t Beanstalk Data use personalized URLs? When I called the company, I got my answer.

Beanstalk Data has its own programmers on staff, and this integrated application works extremely well. For long-term clients, the application is designed to integrate with the customer’s database, CRM software, point of sale software, Outlook, and so on, and based on that activity, set off an automated sequence of events based on triggers.

While there are third-party personalized URL software programs that do the same thing, by using a proprietary program, Beanstalk doesn’t pay a license or per-URL fee.

Beanstalk Data also feels that, in many cases, it achieves higher response rates by not printing the recipient’s name in the URL, since this can trigger concern among recipients that they will be tracked. While barcodes are used for all types of tracking, many recipients may think this code is simply part of the postal delivery process.

Even if they do know it’s for tracking, it might be used to track location or other aspects of the campaign, such as the message. In any case, it’s better than knowing that, through a personalized URL, you’re being tracked for sure.