Testing the Waters

The Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation's first direct mail campaign is aimed at persuading former fishing-license holders to renew.

In March the Alexandria, VA-based group started sending a 1.5 million- to 2 million-piece campaign to “lapsed anglers” in all 50 states. The RBFF acts as a marketing agency for the boating and fishing industries and promotes conservation of water resources.

Frank Peterson, the 10-year-old organization's president, says letters, self-mailers and postcards are being used. The basic offer drives people to www.takemefishing.org, which links to the RBFF's site (www.rbff.org). Here recipients can renew their state fishing licenses online using a credit card.

“We're not doing anything with business reply envelopes or cards,” Peterson says. “It's all going to our Web site.”

Besides promoting the licenses (which sell for about $15), the mailings offer $10 coupons, gift cards, magazine subscriptions and other products as premiums.

Peterson concedes that in most states the RBFF will send only one mailing. But a second one may be done in some states later this year depending on response to the initial wave.

The RBFF plans to follow the mailings with a direct response radio campaign in individual states two to three weeks after each drop. Those spots will run primarily on sports and talk stations between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m.

Since the 1990s overall participation in boating and fishing has fallen off. One measure of this is fishing licensing. Renewals have been slipping 3% to 5% a year. And, according to Peterson, “research has shown that at any given time there could be 12 million lapsed anglers out there in the marketplace.” (A lapsed angler is loosely defined as someone who had a state fishing license for at least one year out of the last three.)

Until now, Peterson says, the RBFF had relied mostly on television, print and Internet efforts to get expired fishing-license holders back into the fold. “We had good brand-awareness numbers but participation was still slipping.”

In the past couple of years the group conducted smaller tests in Michigan, Minnesota and Ohio, some of which pulled responses between 6% and 20%.

“From these pilot tests we [learned] who these people are and where they live. [We got to know] a lot more about them. We decided to use that knowledge and take the direct approach.

“A recent study showed that only 15% of anglers bought a license between 2000 and 2005,” he continues. “When you compare that to what membership organizations look for in returning membership, it was pretty low.”

Notably, Peterson stresses, these license sales, as well as excise taxes on angling and boating equipment, fund aquatic conservation.

“So those dollars go back into fish habitat, waterway cleanup and [everything] associated with fishing and boating.”

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Avnet Drop Pops

An ongoing campaign from Avnet Technology Solutions that includes an unusual dimensional piece is getting a 5% to 10% response.

In January the Phoenix-based computer equipment distributor began sending the first of several drops to some 2,000 executives and owners at its reseller partners to persuade them to carry additional products and services. The challenge was to get the piece past those who open the execs' correspondence and likely would discard it as “junk mail,” notes Stephanie Allred, account director at Mindspace, Avnet's agency.

“We do a lot of direct mail campaigns with postcards and dimensional mailers that are boxes or tubes,” she says, adding that those packages often draw feedback as high as 20%. But such pieces generally are more expensive than less elaborate packages and Avnet had a limited budget for the campaign.

So Mindspace designed a multisided cardboard piece that pops up when the recipient opens the envelope.

Promotional copy is printed on each side of the pop-up as well as an address for a Web site where product information and a request form for future contact are posted.

Avnet has run two of eight planned campaigns using the dimensional. The last mails in December. After that, Allred says, the company will decide whether to keep using it. — LR