How do you convince an IT department to pay for something that Oracle just started offering for free?

You dig deep into the subject matter and uncover the hidden costs of Oracle RMAN—and why BMC SQL-BackTrack is worth paying for.

 

It requires enough evidence to persuade a B2B audience with some solid facts.

 

 

Of course, it’s helpful to offer an incentive …

 

 

Poring over white papers and PowerPoint decks, and talking to the product manager, I organized three main benefit buckets: Hidden Costs, Reducing Risks and Driving revenue.

 

 

Each bucket has four proof points. This direct mail piece with the offer of a free Apple iPod Nano got the attention of IT managers who had to justify to their boss the need to pay for something that Oracle is offering for free.

Here’s reason #1:

“RMAN may be free, but the considerable time and costs involved in its implementation aren’t free. While BMC SQL-BackTrack has always distinguished itself for its ease of implementation and use, our sample environment of 50 servers with 214 Oracle instances shows that a DBA team of ten would spend an estimated 1,250 hours over a full calendar year to implement RMAN. The cost for 1,250 hours at an average $62 per hour is $77,500. Add training days, and you can see RMAN is far free.”

This core content developed for the direct mail piece was leveraged into an integrated campaign with email and interactive.

Email One
The first of three, this email introduces the proposition that BMC Recovery Manager is better than RMAN, offers the first four reasons and drives traffic to the interactive offer.

Email Two
The second email is received by contacts that didn’t respond to the first email. It says, “We told you there were 12 good reasons to use BMC Recovery Manager…” and discusses the next set of reasons–again driving the contact to the interactive offer.

Email Three
This “last chance” email is the last of the series and discusses the final reasons, while also offering a white paper as an additional offer.

Interactive Offer
As a way to stand out from the standard offer of a white paper or webinar, this interactive mini-site provides a unique way to explore a complex, technical subject.

Award
This campaign won a bronze award in the interactive campaign category at the 2007 Art Directors Club of Houston show.