If you were living in Britain in 2014 there’s a high chance you saw the Gtech AirRAM vacuum cleaner, or even own one. A consumer campaign that achieved a sterling result, it is one of the best integrated campaigns this country has seen in decades. The proposition was simple: a cordless vacuum that rivalled both price and technology of the leading manufacturers and home delivered, it was both back and time-saving. But how did Gtech do it?
The 2014 campaign won a silver DMA award. With a campaign budget of £3m, two thirds of which was allocated to TV advertising, direct mail and online and PR spend accounting for the remainder. Over the promotional period it made 39,000 sales, which generated £14.4 million in revenue and a net profit of £2.9 million. This is an impressive result for a little-known brand and a new entry in the market.
And the detail is even more compelling.
While the star of the campaign was television advertising and possibly the best way to demonstrate the vacuum’s effectiveness, it only had an ROI of 3:1 (£6.5 million sales). The support acts: direct mail, PR and online actually converted better and closed the deal. With a fold-out mailer sent to 700,000 homes, direct mail made half the sales of television with an eighth of the budget. ROI? 5:1. So you can imagine with an increased direct mail budget how much better the sales would have performed on a hugely successful campaign. It’s important to note that there’s a 20% uplift in conversion when direct mail campaigns are integrated, so suck up some knowledge from Gtech’s success and build a campaign to draw your customers in.
Using direct mail as a key part of their integrated direct marketing, they are receiving hundreds of orders a day. Their products range from £150 through to £1,000 in value.
The direct mail return of investment for Gtech is 5:1 and it’s an extra revenue stream that is creating more and more profits and product movement than just press, digital and DRTV alone.
Direct mail has allowed Gtech to build a stronger, bigger and better database with every mailing, and they began with only a data set of 20,000 prospects.
In just over three years this has grown year on year to significant mailings over each seasonal variation with considerable growth planned.
Needless to say, our mailing house worked hard to achieve this success, success based on a brilliant product range, a great price and most importantly integrated campaigning, timed to perfection, to deliver the best results.
Gtech are going from strength to strength and just launched AirRam Mk2 last September.
Gtech work is currently running on our new Xerox Trivor 2400.