SUN HITS C-LEVEL WITH X-RAY CAMPAIGN

Establishing relationships with the C-levels is one tough task. Not only are they difficult to reach and time poor, but they don’t necessarily want to know who you are or what you are selling.

The most prominent challenge, surprisingly, may not be the C-Levels themselves, when it comes to securing their time – it is their Personal Assistants (PAs) or secretaries whom we need to bypass to get through to these professionals. 

Gosh’s success with this direct mail campaign for Sun Microsystems exemplifies a simple insight – that reaching out to the right audience using the right delivery channel is critical. To do this, the agency evaluated each component of the strategy and figured that in order to reach the C-Level’s desk, the delivery was most important in this situation.

Content is meaningless, of course, unless we present it to targeted prospects and our challenge is first reaching the prospects, and then presenting the offering and offer.

Most DM pieces will be opened by the administrative staff and in order to negotiate this challenge, there is one way to do it -- a pack that is confidential in nature so that it does not get opened without the prospect’s permission and arrives straight to the prospect’s desk.

Gosh conceptualised a simple but lethal creative that could do just the job. A personal X-ray from the diagnostic imaging department that no PA should open but deliver straight to their bosses. Using an X-Ray also suggests it is about time to review the health of the organisation based on the cost benefits of their servers.

To tie in with the contents of the pack, a customised offer was also conceptualised together with the client. A trade-in for a faster, leaner, and more powerful “heart” of the organisation was designed. This was also conceptually supported with an appointment card to fix up a meeting with the client. A customised brown X-ray envelope with no logos was executed to ensure believability. We made sure that the envelope looked as convincing as possible so the PAs handed them directly over to the CEO.

The offerings at the point were the Sun Fire X2100, X4100 and X4200 servers – one of the industry’s most energy-efficient servers in its class. A trade-in diagnosis of prospect’s old server via registration on a microsite not only fitted the bill to a tee but also reinforced the idea to remove the “weak-at-heart” servers. Then those who signed up were given an added incentive to buy the Sun Fire servers.

Of 1,245 direct mails sent, 732 unique click through were registered at Sun’s microsite during the campaign period. The conversion from click through to sign up was about 11%. The direct mail also encouraged word-of-mouth among the C-Levels. But not all the responses were completely what the agency expected. Some prospects phoned in to their Sun representatives to raise concerns about such future stunts – as some C-Levels were requested out of meetings by their receptionist to collect their X-Ray imaging.

Theodore Choo
CEO
Gosh Advertising.
 
Out Box:

The Mail
Objective
Create product awareness about Sun’s Fire servers and inform the target C-level executives about the trade-in offer.
 
Approach
A direct mail campaign, with a unique touch strategy that cut through gatekeepers and reached to the desks of CEO, CIO and CTOs, hence scoring an opportunity to communicate the benefits of the Sun Fire x64 servers to make a compelling trade-in offer.

Result
A total of 1,245 DM packs were mailed out. 732 unique click throughs were registered. About 90 responses were also received via email and about 11% of the click through -- 79 companies -- registered for the competitive trade-in.