The postcard design used a bright blue color scheme to engage prospects. They also featured a picture of two gorgeous pageant contestants to get postcard recipients interested in participating. The prospects could visualize themselves or their child wearing the crown, and it compelled them to call to find out more. The headline read, “You could be next!” then invited the reader to think about what it would be like to be a pageant winner, while the picture of the recent winners reinforced the glamour that comes with winning.

The Situation

Houston Beauty Pageant Company wanted a way to promote their pageants that was both easy and effective. Their PostcardMania marketing consultant had a discussion with them to fully understand the dynamics of their business and situation, and then suggested a DirectMail2.0 campaign to achieve their marketing goals.

The Solution

A DirectMail2.0 campaign consists of many distinct marketing strategies integrating together to result in a complete and complimenting marketing program. This means it creates leads, nurtures leads, and even tracks the results of the campaign so you can continually build off success. And all of this happens automatically. The main drivers of the campaign are the direct mail postcards and the automatic online follow-up. For the lead generation portion of the campaign, our designers put together a postcard design that is as beautiful as it is effective. Once prospects go to the pageant website, the automated follow-up portion of the campaign kicks in. Prospects that visit the website are automatically tracked and followed up with via banner ads after they leave the site. The ads we created match the design style of the postcard, even using the same images. This helps immediately orient the prospect when they see it, so they know who the ad is from and can focus on the content of the message.

The Results

Added 1,900 prospects to their online follow-up list!

In the first 5 days, they got 259 online follow-up ad clicks and 245,718 total online ad impressions (number of times the ad was seen). Over the next 15 days, they received another 49 banner ad clicks and 73,330 more online ad impressions. As of this writing, they were able to add 1,900 people to their online follow-up list. To put these results in perspective, this means that over 20 days 308 people a) went to the pageant website (most likely due to the postcards), and b) returned to the site via the online follow-up banner ads. It is unlikely these prospects would have returned to the site without the banner ads to remind them. That is the power of automatic online follow-up!

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