Fast food menus, catalogues, flyers … Our audience ignore almost everything that lands on their doormat. We needed to design a cost-effective mailer that would stand out amongst the promotional mail, and be impossible to ignore.

Waiting for news of an operation is stressful, and it got us thinking, what else does our audience have to wait for? They wait for home deliveries too.

In the UK, if a delivery arrives when you’re not around, you are given a ‘while you were out’ or a ‘sorry we missed you’ card. Companies from the UK Royal Mail, to Amazon, to private couriers all use a similar format for these cards, so they are instantly recognizable to a UK audience. And unlike other promotional materials, these cards are almost always picked up, and rarely thrown away.

So, we used the format of a reminder for one service, to raise awareness of another.

We needed to create something to stand out amongst the promotional mail that arrives on UK doorsteps. Using a DM postcard format, we created the ‘while you were out’ mailer, echoing the design of UK delivery cards that land on the doormat when people are waiting for packages.

But instead of notifying about a package that the audience were waiting for, our mailer told them that with BUPA’s on demand service, an operation is something they don’t have to wait for any longer.

Building on the insight that the wait for their operation will be on their mind continually, the text of the mailer explained that: “While you were out, you may have been thinking about your hip replacement, knee operation, cataracts surgery or other operations” with a response mechanism of a dedicated URL and phone number for more information about how to avoid waiting times with Bupa on Demand.

The campaign was overwhelmingly successful, generating a 132% increase in number of calls to Bupa on Demand, and a 39% increase in the number of active leads. Overall, it led directly to led to a 50% increase in the number of operations during the period that it was running.

Due to a dedicated URL and call center number for the campaign, every lead generated by the mailer was trackable. and was proven to have been noticed and understood by more of the audience, as evidenced by feedback from BUPA, that the quality of all leads generated by this campaign was better on average than previous highly targeted online display and Facebook campaigns. These results were all achieved for half the spend of previous campaigns.