Aguilera E-mail Gets 40% Pass-along

Music marketer BMG sent out a rich media e-mail about Christina Aguilera's new CD “Stripped,” hoping to prompt tons of sales online two weeks before the album hit the stores last fall. But something else happened.

The video clip of the gyrating, nearly naked pop star singing the ditty “Dirty” attracted a 40% pass-along rate — more pass-alongs than BMG had ever seen. Even better, 2,581 of the people who received the e-mail from a friend opted in to BMG's Aguilera database.

“You can't get a more qualified lead,” said Kieve Huffman, senior director of strategic online marketing at New York-based BMG.

And BMG funded the entire fall campaign for under $10,000.

The message broadcast to 313,000 hard-core Aguilera fans Oct. 15. The goal was to engender urgency: Be the first on your block to buy the new album! The purchase could be completed right in the e-mail. BMG hoped that e-mail recipients would order in time to receive the CD on their doorstep just as stores opened with newly pressed copies on Oct. 29.

“The music industry is much like the film industry — so much of what we're doing is predicated on having a big first week,” Huffman said. Traditionally, sales drop off 40% between the first and second week the album is in stores. The pre-orders are added to the first week's sales.

BMG, which reserves rich media promotions for its superstars like Dave Matthews and Foo Fighters, has learned the most effective creative is to place the video clip at the top. In the middle is the forward feature: people were entered to win a signed poster of Aguilera for passing on the e-mail to three friends. At the bottom is the plea to buy.

Some 30,972 of the recipients opened the e-mail, and 20,000 played the clip. Of those who opened the message, 40% passed it along to friends. And, of the forwards, more than 2,000 signed up for future updates from BMG.

“The beautiful thing is you know those new sign-ups are interested, you know they're fans, and the only cost to BMG was the poster,” said Jay Stevens, vice president of marketing at Avalon Digital Marketing Systems Inc., Huntington Beach, CA, which handled the rich media.

The low conversion of 0.5% surprised the marketer, which has been accustomed to 1% to 3% sales from rich media. The list, Huffman explained, hadn't been e-mailed much, and probably wasn't as clean as it could be.

But the transfusion of healthy new addresses will help. At press time, BMG was planning to e-mail the database a promotion for “Beautiful,” a single on the album. “This list is only going to get better as we continue to market to it,” Huffman said.