Email marketing: Wunderman's campaign for Kern

Objectives
Increase brand value among the existing customer base and motivate click-through to the Kern website.

Strategy and marketing
The target was a niche audience of scientists, pharmacists and engineers. This community are interested in quantification and precision. Crucially, they almost never receive creative marketing. In these sectors, marketing is predominantly price and function-led. None of Kern’s main competitors engage in any creative loyalty programmes.

This audience receive some of the dullest communication possible. It’s invariably scientific and full of facts and figures. Unfortunately, it’s also what they expect to receive. There was a great opportunity to do something different to present Kern as innovative and interesting, with a huge passion for what it does. Click-throughs on Kern emails were surprisingly high compared to other sectors – Kern had previously achieved 50% open rates and 25% click-throughs to their main site.

The aim was to build on the previous ‘precision guess the weight contest’ campaign with something more engaging and humorous. To avoid outright selling, the communication needed to celebrate Kern’s huge passion for precision. A Valentine’s message was the perfect opportunity to do this. An email went out leading recipients to the Kern website to view the experiment proving it’s possible to measure the weight of a kiss. Visitors were then prompted to engage with other campaign experiments. It was irreverent, fun and timely. But it also had the unique brilliance of the brand at the heart of the execution.

Results
95% open rate, 60% click-through rate, plus responses from over 50% of Kern’s top 50 customers. This click-through rate smashed previous records (already high) by over 200%. Five companies that received this email are now clients. And two resellers signed up. This is an additional €140,000 for 2011. That’s 1,400 % ROI. This is part of a larger campaign that has resulted in a 30% revenue increase since 2009.