Identity Direct

About Identity Direct

Identity Direct sells a unique range of personalised products and gifts via mail order, school fundraisers and more recently, online. They have a range of children's accessories, rulers, pencils, pencil cases, charts, lunch boxes and more. Their My Adventure books have been popular with children for over 20 years.

The Challenge

Traditionally, Identity Direct has sold its products over the phone or by mail order through channels such as catalogues, the Yellow envelope and letter box drops.

In recent times they have been actively collecting customer email addresses and promoting their website. However, the transition of their existing customers from offline to online purchasing behaviour, and the growth of their email database, had been slower than they would like.

Without a targeted strategy, Identity Direct realised they would not drive enough traffic to their website to meet their sales goals.

The Objectives

To solve their business problem and accelerate the growth of their online sales, Identity Direct determined a number of clear objectives:

• Grow their database of emails
• Collect relevant data for more effective marketing
• To collect birthday information to start sending regular birthday e-cards
• To boost awareness and drive traffic to the website via proactive promotion
• Ultimately, increased web sales would determine the success of the campaign

Identity Direct engaged Campaign Master to partner with them in developing a digital marketing strategy to meet their objectives.

“Campaign Master not only helped me grow our database using viral marketing but also came up with a longer term strategy to help me retain the new subscriber base.” - Andrew Lang, Identity Direct

How Campaign Master helped

Campaign Master proposed a viral marketing and online promotion strategy to help Identity Direct reach a new audience and grow their existing email database.

The offer
Firstly, in order to encourage referrals, Identity Direct offered a prize pack - “The Bedroom Blitz”, to appeal to its target audience.

Data capture
Campaign Master developed a high impact landing page to capture entries. To drive referrals, entrants were asked to forward the email to a friend before entering the competition. All entries and referrals were recorded for reporting.

During the entry process, they sought permission to contact entrants again and also asked a number of profiling questions to enhance the effectiveness and relevance of future campaigns.

Follow up
All entrants received an automated ‘thank you’ email. The winner was announced to all entrants by email, giving Identity Direct a chance to keep in touch and establish trust with their database.

The Results

• A total of 59,560 emails were sent
• An additional viral reach of almost 12,000 referrals
• 4,764 competition entries and profiles collected
• New prospect emails collected was 1,926
• Over 40% were new registrations

Following this success in Australia, the campaign has also been rolled out in the US, Canada, UK and New Zealand.

Viral Tips

• Use the competition subscription forms as a way to collect more information about your recipient such as their interests and preferences.
• When thanking your recipient for entering the competition, ask them to add you to their address book to ensure you do not get blocked by spam filters.
• Create trust between your brand and the recipient by emailing them the results of the competition.