• by Kate Kaye , January 16, 2003

It’s a catch-22 situation: to sell its music, BMG must garner as much radio air-time as possible. The thing is, the first week of sales is key in determining how often a record gets played on commercial radio.

The Objective

The music label was up against this very dilemma when it came to promoting the Dave Matthews Band album, Busted Stuff. To ensure radio play, BMG aimed to drive as many pre-order sales as possible before the album’s in-store release date of July 16, 2002. A rich media email campaign created in conjunction with Avalon Digital Marketing Systems made it happen.

“We're using email more and more as it's an extremely cost effective way of communicating with our fan base and reaching them where we know they spend the majority of their time online, in their email inbox,” comments Kieve Huffman, director of online marketing at BMG.

The Strategy

Ten days before Busted Stuff hit the stores messages were sent to the list of DMB enthusiasts (mainly males aged 15-30) who have registered through the label’s and band’s sites. Despite its small file size of 12k, the message packed a punch, enticing recipients to buy with automatically streaming video footage and audio featuring a medley of songs from the album. Avalon’s Java-based RadicalMail technology enabled all users, even those with slower dial-up connections, to view the most optimum form of the video.

Because such a large amount of people view their email while using high speed connections at work, deploying rich media within an email environment can provide more value for advertisers and a better user experience than doing the same via the Web, contends Avalon. Over 53% of the campaign recipients viewed the DMB message while using a broadband connection.

“Most people don’t realize that the landscape in which people view email is completely different than Web pages,” stresses Jay Stevens, VP, marketing at Avalon.

Pre-order incentives included a bonus DVD, access to exclusive DMB material and a live audio webcast, as well as entry to win front row tickets to an upcoming DMB show. Showcasing the communal qualities of music and the viral aspect of email, the message tempted recipients to share the message with at least three friends with entry to win an autographed, framed poster.

The in-email order form also helped push sales by allowing buyers to go through the entire ordering process within a secure environment that existed directly in the email message, no click through to a site necessary.

The Results

Avalon gauged the BMG/DMB brand experience by tracking 40 data points including open time (an average of one minute, 53 seconds), forwards per recipient (three on average) and the number of times users viewed the video (an average of 3.6 times).

The true proof was in the pre-order sales. Of the 650,000 messages sent, 150,000 were opened, over 5,000 CDs were pre-ordered through the email form and around 200 CDs were pre-ordered through messages that had been forwarded. It comes as no surprise that BMG is using this same email strategy in a number of pre-order promotions.

“Email, especially rich media email, has been looked at as a one-off event. As in TV, airing one ad isn’t the way to build a brand. It takes repetition; it takes frequency,” says Stevens. “The real value of what BMG is doing is they found a recipe and a formula that works and they’re using it over and over again.”