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Let the Snowballs Roll…

Top up your panel by throwing snowballs.

DID YOU KNOW THAT 17% OF CANADIAN WOMEN ARE BETWEEN THE AGES OF 18 AND 24?
We know it. The owners of the Women's Voice Online know it. Now even their panelists know it. But despite this statistic, as of two months ago Canadian women aged 18 to 24 comprised only 4% of the Women's Voice panel, which was meant to be representative of the English-speaking, female, viewing audience of Corus Entertainment's specialty channel the W Network.

Corus Entertainment looked to us for help in making the panel more representative and asked what we could do to attract more 18 to 24 year old women. We love a good challenge, so we accepted. This is our story.

WE'RE TRYING TO CREATE A REALLY BIG SNOWBALL, AND WE NEED YOUR HELP!
Recruiting can be costly, particularly when targeting low incidence segments. In this case, we didn't need to add a large number of women to make it more representative. We only needed a handful. The problem was that this handful were a very specific group of individuals. The other problem was a very limited budget. Mass media blanket campaigns were out of the question. Even crisply targeted online advertising campaigns were questionable. The final hurdle was the simple fact that the Women's Voice is a 'blind' panel, meaning the owner isn't identified to the panelists. This also rules out access to a customer database or any client media properties.

What we were left with was one obvious resource, the panel itself. The panel consists of over 2000 women who are actively engaged in the panel research process. The simple plan was to leverage our existing panelists to get their friends, family, associates, sisters, daughters, neighbors, etc. involved.

LET THE SNOWBALLS ROLL...
Take a tiny ball of snow and roll it on the ground. Even better, roll it down a hill. As the snowball rolls it picks up more snow, making the snowball bigger and bigger. The bigger the ball gets the more snow it picks up; the more snow it picks up the bigger it gets. You get the picture. Now, imagine your 2000 panelists are a tiny ball of snow...

SO... I'M LIKE... WHATEVER...
Put yourself in the shoes of women between the ages of 18 and 24. What are they thinking? What motivates them? We turned to Google and a whole series of blogs, not just for young women, but written by them to find the answers to these pressing questions. Who better to get us up to speed?

While we had found loads of writing by 18 to 24 young women with an inclination towards sitting in front of their computers all night writing in their blogs, we were skeptical that all of our current panelists were likewise minded. So, we went to the panel to find out. We have demographic information on all of our so it was easy to find out who they were.

Contrary to our initial assumptions, our 18 to 24 year old panelists are not a bunch of starry eyed young girls that are still in school or living at home with their parents. 65% of them watch the Discovery Channel regularly! And a full 46% of them are either married or cohabitating! 17% of them even have young children of their own.

HOW DO WE GRAB THEIR ATTENTION?
To engage the widest possible audience we needed to target three groups: those seeking incentives, those seeking information, and those looking to be heard.

Those seeking incentives are always the easiest to find, simply offer them something they want. Our offer was $100 to spend on lunch with their girlfriends. For every one of their girlfriends that joined the panel, they would be entered into our draw. To entice those who cherish a sense of social belonging, as well as those who are keen to share their opinions, we turned to interesting stats taken directly from the panel itself.

Because of all the data we have on our panelists, it was easy to find loads of interesting facts to entice our other target groups.

Captivating email copy and creative were the final ingredients. We took a really simple approach to the creative, making it generic enough so that all sorts of women would be able to relate, but without feeling that we needed to accurately portray each and every one of our panelists. We may aggregate their data, but our panelists are still unique and individual people.

SEE THE INITIAL EMAIL CAMPAIGN HERE.

APPARENTLY WE ALL REALLY DO KNOW 18 - 24 YEAR OLDS.
Within 2 minutes of sending out the first batch of emails, we had already collected 5 new email addresses - progress! By day 3, we had collected over 70 email addresses and had achieved a whopping 20% response rate to this simple yet targeted campaign. Typical campaigns of this type net about a 4% response rate.

After a few days we decided to take the campaign beyond the 18 to 24 year old sample group. We tweaked the copy slightly and sent out emails to the rest of the panel. Within 2 hours, we had collected an additional 200 addresses! The response rate among the rest of the panelists was lower than among the 18 to 24 year olds - about 8% - but the shear number of panelists involved allowed for a far higher number of addresses to be collected. Since we didn't come up with a whole new campaign directed at the remainder of the panel, the lower response rate was to be expected, but 8% is still double what we had anticipated.

CHECK OUT THE EMAIL THAT WENT TO THE REST OF THE PANEL HERE.

All in all we collected over 350 useable email addresses and ended up with 25 new 18 to 24 year old panelists. This may not sound impressive, but consider that there were only 84 panelists between the ages of 18 and 24 to begin with; that?s an increase of 30%!

SNOWBALLS KEEP FALLING...
Now, the nature of a snowball is to keep rolling - as long as it's headed downhill - so our next step is to engage our 25 new panelists in the search for their friends. Slow going, but in our world every panelist counts!

Posted on September 1, 2005
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