CHALLANGE

Aquent Partners wants to be more than just another headhunter/job placement firm for Web designers and developers. They’re modeling themselves on top Hollywood talent agencies, offering the best-of-the-best Web pros a chance to be personally represented throughout their career by an experienced agent. Their marketing campaign had two goals -- to position Aquent as a status symbol and to collect resumes from top-tier Web pros.

CAMPAIGN

Aquent’s marketing agency Passaic Parc started with heavy research. Passaic Parc’s Robert Rosenthal explains, “We interviewed Web pros about their lives. We learned these people are working their butts off now and they feel they deserve compensation.” This insight turned into highly compelling copy. The resulting email campaign’s headline read, “Since you’ve decided to be a chronically sleep deprived Web pro, make sure you’re a well paid, highly fulfilled, chronically sleep deprived Web pro.”

The email positioned Aquent Partners as “someone to get you cool work inside hot companies. And make sure you’re paid everything you’re worth.” All art was in super-cool looking black and white, which increased its impact to these design-sensitive pros.

OFFER

Recipients were offered a free Web Skill & Salary Guide just for clicking through. The first 100 responders to give a resume to Aquent also got a free Sharper Image Q Ball.


RESULTS

100,000 HTML and text emails were broadcast resulting in more than 3,400 clickthrough responses (and still counting) with about a 35% resume submission rate. Rosenthal says, “HTML is consistently pulling much better results than text. There can be more than a 100% difference in results. This is massive stuff, a phenomenon.”

NOTES

Aquent also dropped a direct mail campaign of 80,000 pieces and several banner ads mirroring the creative in the email campaign. Vendors used included IDG List Services, The Smith Print and Dickinson Direct.

Useful links related to the article

Aquent Partners
http://www.aquent.com

Passaic Parc
http://www.passaicparc.com