Challenge

Wave Broadband is a western region cable TV, broadband internet, and telephone provider serving over 450,000 households in Washington, Oregon and California.

Initially, Wave’s direct mail strategy and creative was managed internally by their marketing team. The internal Wave team was a small group with big goals, but was overburdened with too many marketing and advertising responsibilities. They didn’t have the specialized expertise to accomplish testing or analysis and could not make DM as effective as it could be to drive ongoing sales.

The CMO at Wave suspected their direct mail programs could work much harder and that they might be paying too much through a local production vendor.  Her challenge to meet sales goals was to improve their direct mail performance quickly, while also finding outside resources to help her team accomplish more without adding to staff.

Actions

RPM was hired to improve Wave’s processes and to create higher performing direct mail for acquisition and customer communications. The RPM team started by reviewing Wave’s current efforts, taking a critical look at everything from creative to testing plans to results measurement.

Next, we plotted a course for testing, analysis and optimization while also delivering a steady flow of new creative and test concepts. Once the plan was approved we took over printing and production, providing a significant cost savings over their incumbent vendor. This gave Wave a complete outsourcing solution for high-performing ongoing direct mail programs.

Results

Since taking on the Wave direct mail programs in 2011, we have provided ongoing creative development, testing strategy, production, tracking and analysis, managing the full execution of more than 50 programs per year. RPM’s programs and approach have allowed Wave to continue to mail very aggressively while minimizing market fatigue and optimizing their DM spend for maximum ROI.

Over the past seven years working with Wave, the RPM creative team has created and executed many new test package concepts to help Wave increase and optimize sales performance. Ongoing creative and offer testing has led to over 12 new “Control” package formats for Wave, with increases of up to 65%in response performance over previous programs.

Data testing also identified a new market segmentation approach and parts of the audience with 45% higher response rates. Using more effective market segmentation allows Wave to focus spending on the most responsive and profitable households, reducing mail volume but producing more overall sales.

By outsourcing all DM printing and mailing to RPM, Wave significantly reduced costs, and also freed up their internal marketing team’s bandwidth for new opportunities.

RPM takes great pride in being a key marketing partner for Wave, and in helping them to become one of the fastest growing internet and cable providers on the West Coast.