Gumball

Background

Australia Post is constantly looking for new ways to get people to use mail and Send Me is one such idea, a way of allowing people to respond to advertising more easily. See an ad that offers a free sample, or you want the brochure and more information, if the ad has the Send Me logo, you can just ping an SMS message to the advertiser via Send-Me.

It’s a permission-based scheme that can help marketers reach the people who want to be reached rather than spending money on mailing to be people who don’t.

The challenge was to get FMCG marketers in particular, and their agencies, aware of the service and to generate leads for the sales team to follow up.

Idea

The idea was interactive and engaging, allowing marketers to trial the new service before committing to it.

Because the creative strategy was to position Send Me as ‘the simpler sampling solution’, the challenge was to actually prove it by getting the target to sample it for themselves.

They were mailed an empty gumball machine with the line, ‘Get a taste of Send Me’. Copy explained that this could be achieved if they used the Send Me SMS service to order their choice of treats to fill their gumball machine. Those who responded would be mailed a follow-up pack of mints, chocolates or jelly babies and more details about the service.

Results

After the first 2 lodgements, the mailer generated a 30% response rate – double the objective of 15%. In other words, 30% of the target audience actually trialled the Send Me service themselves, requesting the follow-up pack, further engaging with Australia Post and familiarising themselves with Send Me in the process.

Our Thoughts

This is a clever idea, to get people to opt in to direct mail but it does rely on clients seeing for themselves the value of permission-based communications. Because it’s also a new idea, it’s also quite complicated to explain. On Australia Post’s website it takes 1,250 words. But this dimensional mailing is more than just a nice bit of reductive thinking, it also has a little insight within it.

Namely, that the office is often a joyless place to be. A gumball machine dispensing sweeties can make it more playful, nicer, can get people chatting and laughing. Forget the water-cooler, the gumball conversation is what you want.

Sadly, however, the office here at Directory Manor remains serious and dull because, while Cubed did send us a couple of their other submissions through the post so we could inspect them first-hand, they did not send us a gumball machine.