Raeco’s Forget-me-not Campaign

Raeco is a leading New Zealand and Australian supplier of goods and service solutions to the education information community. This sector includes schools, public libraries, commercial Libraries and Government Dept libraries. Their products include stationery, book covering, storage and display products, signage, furniture, shelving, books, readers and teacher classroom and curriculum resources.

Sales are primarily conducted through phone and fax sales from the office and warehouse facility in East Tamaki, Auckland.

Being a direct marketing based business, Raeco had wisely established a website with the intention of transferring some of the sales load through to that channel. However, it was quickly recognized that the website was not going to work on its own. There were a few committed website users but sales had flattened out at that level.

Dave Speedy, GM Library Division, decided that email marketing could help.

The Overall Email Marketing Objectives
Following a redevelopment of the site, the following email marketing objectives were set in place:
• To raise awareness of the site
• To increase online sales to represent 15% of total sales
• To grow the website customer database to 30% of total customers

The Strategies
Driving usage of the website will take some time and will need a number of different approaches. The first is what became known as the “Forget-me-Not” strategy. In this, it was decided to reward customers for any use of the website. More precisely this meant updating their details, referring a friend to the site, registering as a member or placing an order.

More Precisely…..
The tactics involved with this were as follows:
• New member signup – reward with a free gift of a packet of “forget-me-not” seeds and entry into the prize draw for $500 worth of Raeco products.
• Refer a friend – reward with an entry into the prize draw
• Place an order – reward with an entry into the prize draw and get a free gift of a packet of seeds
• Update Your Details – reward with an entry into the prize draw and get a free gift of a packet of seeds
• Use space on the offline sales promotion flyer to drive traffic to the website. This flyer is mailed to the entire customer database quarterly and features full colour product shots and special offers.

Duration
The campaign ran for two months, May and June 2003

Outcomes
Customer database grew by almost 33% during two months of the campaign. It has continued to grow since the end of the campaign to an increase of almost 54% compared with before the campaign started. Sales doubled in the first month of the campaign and by the end of the campaign had almost tripled on the monthly average.

Visit the Raeco NZ Ltd Website here.