How do you educate potential customers about your products and build a robust prospect list in a fragmented and highly technical industry outside the reach of mass media? Faced with just such a challenge, Melissa Stolow, senior marketing manager at Carlsbad, California-based Invitrogen, and her team came up with an innovative solution, one born out of their intimate knowledge of the day-to-day worklife of their customers.

“Our original idea for the campaign came from walking through all these labs where nuclear receptor research scientists work,” recalls Stolow. Those particular researchers, who study metabolic diseases like diabetes and obesity, represent the prime customers for Invitrogen’s cellular test kits. “They are constantly drawing pictures of their chemical workflow on whiteboards so we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we could send them something fun that was already pre-made into the shapes they’re drawing but that also introduced them to our company’s products as well?’”

And, since every research lab worth its salt is also replete with freezers and refrigerators, Stolow hit upon the clever idea of putting magnets on the back of what eventually turned into a 42- piece set of pre-made symbols. “Researchers go to these freezers hundreds of times a day,” Stolow notes. “So, if we could get our magnets stuck on these fridges and freezers, they would essentially be additional free advertising.”

But how to get these magnets into the right hands and achieve their goal of adding 500 new researcher contacts to their sales database? “We knew we would have to take a multi-platform approach,” Stolow says. So, working out of her company’s Madison, Wisconsin, office, she and her team soon developed a threeprong campaign aimed at reaching a target audience of roughly 25,000 researchers.

First, they sent out a direct mail piece that included a single magnet bearing the company’s name along with a microsite web address. Once there, researchers could order the complete magnet set, but only after giving their contact information and filling out a brief marketing survey. On the same day the mailing went out, Invitrogen also rolled out banner ads about the magnet sets on the company’s website. And finally, two weeks after the initial direct mail push, Invitrogen began a series of email blasts targeting potential customers gleaned from the company’s internal contact database.

Right away, they knew they’d hit a home run. “In the first 15 days, we had profiled 354 contacts,” explains Stolow. By the time the campaign officially ended four months later, she says they had added a total of 693 new contacts to the company’s sales database, for an overall response rate of 2.72%.

“We are very pleased,” Stolow says, adding that the company revenue on its cellular test kits has noticeably increased. Even move impressive, the magnets continue to pull in new customers nearly 18 months after the start of the campaign. “To date, we’ve sent out nearly 2,000 magnet sets and we continue to get new requests,” Stolow says. And perhaps putting a new twist on the old business adage of “sticking it to the other guy,” she notes that “even our competitors have commented to us that they keep seeing our magnet sets on their customers’ laboratory refrigerators.”