MidLantic Marketing is dangling a free two-year lease for a 2003 Mercedes-Benz E320 as the lure in a business-to-business sweepstakes to increase business with current clients and drum up new business with prospects. This marks the company’s first acquisition effort.
The Daytona Beach, FL, marketing agency designs mail pieces that usually involve automobile giveaways. The company decided to use that expertise for its own marketing efforts, sending 60 kits to agencies throughout the country late last month announcing the sweepstakes. Twenty-two went to prospects.
The kits included samples of MidLantic’s marketing promotions, a fact sheet on the company and its services, and a cover letter discussing the rules of the contest. A one-page glossy with a picture of the Mercedes and contest information also was included.
Before conducting the contest, MidLantic was careful to make sure it was running a legal sweepstakes since the chances of winning increase as a company does more mail business with MidLantic.
“We looked at this very carefully before starting it,” said Sean Foster, vice president of sales and marketing at MidLantic. “We approached this in a way where we were telling people to purchase from us because we want your business and not because we have this contest. And the car is going to be awarded to the corporation, not one person within that company.”
Companies who received the piece could either call a toll-free number for more information or visit the Web site to register for the contest. Once registered, each piece of mail that a company agrees to purchase from MidLantic for use in a campaign counts as one entry. The total number of entries for the entire campaign is being capped at 9 million. The drawing is Oct. 1.
Companies that did not want to conduct business with MidLantic could enter the contest by filling out an enrollment form online. They could do this as many times as they would like, with each form counting as one entry.
So far, 12 companies have registered for the contest. Four of the 12 are prospects who received the mailing. Two other prospects did not receive the mail piece but found out about the sweepstakes online. The remaining six registrants are existing customers.
Foster would not say how many of the 12 have agreed to conduct business with MidLantic, but said it has received commitments from a number of them.
“I don’t count anything until I see it being shipped off the dock,” he said. “We have no hard numbers yet. But based on the commitments we have gotten from the registrants to this point we could see an increase of 40 percent in the production of mail pieces for this month.”
In addition, two companies have agreed to run campaigns with MidLantic as a result of the mailing but did not enter the contest. One was a new client and the other was a current customer.
On average, MidLantic produces between 1.5 million and 2 million mail pieces a month for agencies.
