CASE STUDY: Dakota Software Corporation—Tracer Promotion

Dakota® Software Corporation designs and sells two distinct information management software tools designed to help companies achieve and maintain compliance with governmental regulations including those of the Department of Environmental Health and Safety (EHS). Dakota has a solid track record with over 12 years in business. Their first and better-known product is Dakota Auditor, which has credibility and name recognition in the niche field of EHS compliance. As a companion to this product, in March 2000, Dakota introduced its second product, Tracer. Tracer is a powerful project management tool that allows customers to internally track the progress of correcting EHS compliance issues once identified by Auditor or other systems.

Dakota worked with Cognitive Marketing to design Tracer's user interface, name and graphic identity, plus all sales and product material. In addition, Cognitive Marketing developed a marketing program that included a trade advertising campaign, the goal of which was to increase awareness while generating qualified sales leads for the national sales team. Up to that point, leads were generated through referrals or as a result of trade show attendance.

THE IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY
For the product launch, our main objective was to build awareness of Tracer and to capture qualified leads for the sales team. By driving people to the Dakota website, specifically to the newly created Tracer promotional "landing page," visitors had the opportunity to view an animated online preview that illustrated the product's capabilities for improving project management within a diverse company. Viewers were then given the opportunity to contact the Dakota sales team for more information or to set up a product demonstration via telephone or email.

In order to drive traffic to this unique URL our plan called for the following: an HTML email series, a direct mail postcard series, trade publication ads, and links from the home page of the main Dakota website. We purchased 5,000 email and direct mail addresses in Dakota's target audience—top Environmental Health and Safety managers of Fortune 1000 companies throughout the United States.

RESULTS
All website and email activity was tracked using Web trend tracking software. During the five months of the campaign, Dakota experienced a 65% increase in average monthly visitors. The campaign was enormously successful in yielding leads as well. During the first quarter of 2003, qualified leads for Tracer increased over 200% from the same quarter the previous year.