250ok’s email intelligence platform provides products and services for advanced insights into email deliverability, sender reputation, fraud protection, and consumer engagement. To secure more customers in the marketing and retail verticals, 250ok implemented a new loss-leader pricing strategy for DMARC services, knowing that these customers could go on to purchase additional services such as analytics, design, and DKIM/SPF in the future.
To make the loss-leader pricing successful, 250ok’s marketing team needed to promote the pricing to attract new customers. While paid and owned media channels could easily share the offer, the complex nature of security protocols, educating the target audience about how DMARC and why marketing should care, required education — something best addressed using a media relations and thought leadership strategy.
Announcing loss-leader pricing is not newsworthy to the press as a standalone announcement. BLASTmedia was challenged with developing an angle that would gain the attention of the media and still reach the goal of promoting the free DMARC services.
Through conversations with 250ok, there was an understanding that the target customers for the offer were still early in the awareness phase — meaning, 250ok needed to establish the problem, the potential for a phishing attack, and bring visibility to the necessity of DMARC implementation before pushing customers to buy. Knowing the pricing offer alone would not be able to generate coverage or help to educate the audience, BLASTmedia researched what type of additional resources or data would be needed to speak to this audience and add value.
Analysis and Report Creation
With guidance from BLASTmedia, 250ok moved forward with analysis of DMARC implementation in the retail sector. The email intelligence platform company analyzed more than 3,000 top-level domains operated by the top 1,000 US and top 500 EU e-retailers to see if they met the minimum email authentication protocols that protect their brands and consumers from phishing attacks.
Leading into the report creation, BLASTmedia provided an outline of what the ideal report outcomes would look like and a competitor report as an example. Using this example, 250ok created an email-gated, PDF report titled, “DMARC Adoption Among E-Retailers Q1 2018” The report was then gated on the company website and 250ok offered the gated content on a landing page alongside information about how to sign-up for the free DMARC offer.
Media Outreach
Using the “DMARC Adoption Among E-Retailers Q1 2018” report, along with a press release announcing the report as collateral, BLASTmedia made outreach to media contacts in retail, marketing and security trade verticals.
The team worked to stress relevance/newsworthiness by tailoring pitches to focus on the impact of DMARC implementation on marketing teams and ultimately, consumers. For example, outreach to retail trade verticals looked at the number of retail companies that aren’t DMARC compliant and provided a stat that stressed the number of consumers that could be potentially affected.
Following the launch of the report, BLASTmedia secured 15 pieces of coverage in retail, marketing and security publications, which, along with other organic marketing efforts, led to an overall number of 89 prospects signing up for the DMARC software offer on the landing page.
Following the success of the “DMARC Adoption Among E-Retailers Q1 2018” report, 250ok and BLASTmedia moved forward with additional DMARC reports for the following verticals: SaaS, nonprofit, Chinese brands, law firms and higher education institutions.