Case Study - Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft Corporation is the largest and most pervasive software company in the world. Known as an effective mass marketer, Microsoft wanted to take an innovative, new approach to reaching business customers and prospects on a local level. Microsoft's PacWest Division had an interesting challenge – it was targeting an entirely new group of people to attend a Microsoft event in Portland and in Seattle. Instead of reaching its bread and butter IT professionals, Microsoft wanted to get input from CEOs and VP-Marketing of mid-size corporations. Prior direct mail campaigns were costly and produced very little results. Microsoft approached eROI for help. eROI offered Microsoft a way to promote its events through a personalized email campaign and capture qualified leads from those events using an e-interview system.

Program Objectives

• Business requirement for email to be sent directly from Microsoft representative
• Promote Portland and Seattle business productivity events
• Capture qualified leads from these events
• Opportunity for the target audience to co-create event content
• Better understanding of participants

Target Audience

• CEOs, CFOs, Vice President and Directors of Marketing

Challenges

• List Development – Microsoft needed to partner with the Software Association of Oregon and other associations and business networking groups to reach its new target audience

Strategies
Microsoft had a few key requirements for this email campaign – the email needed to be personalized, come from each individual sales or marketing representative, and both email and e-interview must be trackable. The primary objective of this event was to capture information about event invitees and attendees, qualify prospects to convert to Microsoft customers, and learn what the "hot buttons" are for future events.

The email offer was exclusive – you are nominated to attend…The call to action was registering for the event. That call to action took email recipients through a series of a dozen qualifying questions which asked what their expectations of the event were…

Results

• Both Portland and Seattle April events had nearly twice the registrations and attendance as the February Executive Council
• Very positive and candid feedback – both Quantitative and Qualitative from both Seattle and Portland attendees.
• The Portland list was larger than Seattle list, but the list quality was better for Seattle than Portland.
• Portland invitees: smaller companies, came for networking event; Seattle invitees: larger companies, came for Project Management.
• Email reads and click-through for Portland/Seattle higher than normal.
• Portland: ~60% of attendees completed Post-Event e-interview.
  Seattle: ~30% of attendees completed Post-Event e-interview