SUMMARY:

How can you lure visitors back to your site once they’ve been there? Even “registered” users don’t always bother to return, and a “come see our site upgrades” email blast won’t get high clicks.

Promoting a site is even harder if your target audience is engineers – who infamously consider marketing messaging not worth reading.

Discover how after focus group research and email testing, GlobalSpec got more than 500,000 engineers to come play a branded online game … and then stick around for a while to check out the rest of the site:

CHALLENGE

Last fall GlobalSpec, a B-to-B search engine serving engineers, was getting ready to launch a major site upgrade.

Luckily the site already had 1.3 million registered users. But, just as every site with registered users has discovered,
just because people register doesn’t mean they’ll return. “Some people hadn’t been back to the site in a lonmg time,” says Senior Director of arketing Chris Chariton.

Chariton was smart enough to realize that while she and the management team were all excited about the site improvements, sending out an email saying “We’ve upgraded!” would make most recipients yawn and hit ‘delete.’

“We knew we needed something that would draw attention to reach out to our audience with.” To get clicks, there had to be more of a what’s-in-it-for-me factor.

President John Schneiter had an engineering background so the marketing team brainstormed with him. What do engineers find alluring? Answer: engineering puzzles and games.

What do engineers loathe? Answer: lame games (anything not devised by an engineering brain) and marketing crap (almost anything from a marketing department.)

CAMPAIGN

The team decided they would test launching a game ... but only very, very carefully. Nothing’s worse than turning your target market off so they never visit you again.

Step #1. Telephone focus groups

Even though the company was founded by engineers,and had plenty of engineers as staffers, the marketing team worried in-house staff would be to close to the brand to give game ideas a fair evaluation.

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