What Went Wrong? Campaign Falters After the Click

Deborah Gallagher isn’t yet sold on e-mail as a prospecting vehicle. But she’s seems willing to give it at least one more chance.

The director of circulation and marketing for the MIT Sloan Management Review recently tested an outbound e-mail campaign in which the creative seems to have worked like gangbusters, but the leads aren’t converting.

At first glance, the landing page looks to blame. However, as Gallagher points out, there are other possible culprits, as well.

First the creative: Mothers of Invention, a boutique agency in Maynard, MA, decided to play off the fact that the MIT Sloan Management Review is an elite business publication that does not publish puff pieces.

“This is a serious journal for serious people,” said Robert Rosenthal, president of Mothers of Invention. “There are no humor articles, no lifestyle pieces, none of that stuff. It’s for managers who are serious about the art and science of management.”

As a result, the creative depicted a male model with the headline “Sexiest Manager Alive,” and “MIT Sloan Management Review,” “What Doesn’t go into Our Publication is as Important as What Does.”

The campaign, which can be viewed here http://themothersofinvention.com/projects/mit/, then offered recipients a free-trial issue.

At the recommendation of her list broker, Gallagher agreed to test 5,000 names of purported decision makers from E-rewards.com. The list broker said E-rewards had been working for a competitor, according to Gallagher.

“This was our first test of an outside e-mail list,” said Gallagher. “We have been doing e-mail marketing to an internal list. I had looked off and on at using e-mail as for prospecting but I never did it because I couldn’t anyone who said it worked for them.”

The initial result of the campaign was a 29% click-through-to-open rate, according to Rosenthal. “The concept really resonated,” he said.

Added Gallagher: “That e-mail really got people to click.” However, it didn’t get people to convert, she said.

“E-mail worked to a point, but it didn’t get us a lot of customers,” she said. As a result, “we are not yet sold on e-mail as a prospecting vehicle. We see promise because the front end worked so well. This e-mail was very well received and it got a great click-though rate, but then there was substantial fall off.”

One obstacle may be the 27,000-circulation quarterly’s price tag: $89 a year. “These people [on e-Rewards list] may have been looking for something for free,” said Gallagher.

However, Gallagher doesn’t plan to get people to convert by discounting.

“We’re not about lowering our prices,” said Gallagher. “We need to figure out what we need to do to get them to convert. If we’re going to put this price in front of people, we need to do a better job of persuading them that this publication has value.”

She also said the creative may have been too clever. “There may be a disconnect between what you see there [in the creative] and what you see in our publication. One thought is that when people click, they should see some sort of continuation of the creative proposition.”

As a result, Gallagher plans, among other things, to have the landing page redone. “We’re talking now about what that landing page should be like,” she said. “We have so many options now; it could be a video. We don’t want to scare people away, but we need to be really persuasive.”

Though Gallagher is concerned that the universe of e-mail addresses available to her publication for prospecting may be extremely limited, she believes that perfecting the publication’s landing page will not be a wasted effort under any circumstances.

“That could help our business in a bunch of other areas, such as paid search,” she said.

As for the e-mail campaign Rosenthal added: “We’re on the proverbial 20 yard line. Now we’ve got to figure out how to push the ball over the goal line.”