By DPS Staff
Getting a marketing message to stand out during the holiday season is no easy task. The Standard Group utilized its creativity to provide a holiday promotion for the record books. Its Coundown2Holidays self-promotional cross-media campaign took third place in DPS magazine’s annual Innovation of the Year Awards.
The company sought to create a multi-touch, multi-channel holiday campaign to celebrate the season while giving back to customers and local charities.
The campaign had several objectives, including a fun and engaging way to inspire its customers to do something similar for their business, and keep them coming back.
Multi-Channel Cheer
The Standard Group designed and developed a multi-channel solution that featured a gingerbread house direct mailer at the heart of the campaign. The mailer was designed like an advent calendar and encouraged users to help count down to the holidays.
The campaign utilized several channels, including direct mail; Web; email; social media—Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube; and promotional products.
The mailer utilized variable data publishing and consisted of more than 28 versions and featured 27 personalized elements that were tailored to the recipient based on information collected by their sales representative, including the sales representative’s photo and video greeting as well as a personalized URL (pURL) and quick response (QR) code. Additionally, the campaign was segmented by recipient category for relevance.
The piece was also meant to showcase the more personal and talented side of its employees, and so they tapped employees to contribute a personal holiday video greeting, information on holiday favorites such as songs, movies, food, activities, recipes that were later turned into a cookbook, music produced by employees, and finally, a video called All About that Print.
The campaign provided tracking of customer engagement through the pURLs, QR codes, and email.
The promotion’s advent calendar concept enabled the company to offer a gift each day in which the user could order or experience.
The campaign was very successful. On average, the company reports that emails opened at 40.70 percent and a 27.33 percent engagement; engagement by gift days was 31.34 percent.
One of the days included the ability to order a holiday mug with a gourmet chocolate packet and another day featured the ability to donate to a local charity on behalf of The Standard Group. At the end of the campaign, 715 mugs were ordered, 625 donations were made, and 626 cookbook orders were filled.
The company also met its goal of inspiring its customers to follow suit and create personalized, multi-channel marketing campaigns. The company reports creative interest from the campaign and had set up four client meetings for similar solutions at press time.
The Standard Group utilized its Heidelberg offset press and Hewlett-Packard Indigo digital press to produce the campaign. It was created and driven with the help of several software solutions, including Pageflex, MindFireInc, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and Soundcloud.
Promotional Success
The Standard Group’s Counddown2Holiday campaign is a great example of how a marketing service provider can simultaneously showcase it talents, bring in new business, and have fun. dps
