Back to last page bigdough.com Challenge: Attract qualified leads from a relatively small and very busy target universe, for a valuable capital markets database subscription service. In order to grow the company quickly, bigdough needed to generate many sales leads as fast as possible. Solution: While conventional direct marketing wisdom has it that you test, establish a control, and test against it, tweaking small things, bigdough needed to move more quickly. The product was constantly developing, giving us new benefits to push, and we were able to incorporate new case histories often. Bigdough targeted its busy prospects -- CEOs, CFOs and Investor Relation Officers of public companies -- on a regular basis with a variety of direct mail packages which stood out from the crowd. These included a Western Union telegram announcing membership in bigdough, an advertorial reminiscent of a "Wall Street Journal" article, and a "bundle of clippings": a dozen different articles on newsprint and magazine stock incorporating case histories, describing various benefits of the site and explaining how to use it. All campaigns were mailed first-class, in personalized envelopes, including hand-written sticky memos -- a small additional expense considering the returns generated by a new subscriber. Bigdough generated a steady influx of trial users, qualified prospects to be contacted and cultivated by salespeople. Name recognition of bigdough soared, opening the door for further sales efforts. Back to last page