XLN has won an Internet Advertising Competition Award for an innovative Best Small Business Email Message in a witty marketing campaign. Our winning entry, a high-performing email, can be viewed here. The tongue-in-cheek response, a…
The tongue-in-cheek response, authored by XLN copywriter Jack Stratten, is a concise riposte to BT’s observation that XLN is “only” 37% cheaper than BT for similar fibre broadband products – not 44% as initially claimed.
Our XLN CEO statement on the witty marketing campaign: “Creativity doesn’t happen by willing it to. Sometimes, ideas just sneak out. Or, as was the case with a recent email campaign we’ve been running, they land on your desk. The trigger was a letter of complaint from our principle rival, BT. They’d seen some claims on our website that we were 44% cheaper on fibre broadband, when we were in fact only 37% cheaper. They politely but sternly requested that we change our website to reflect this. At first we all laughed, and were quite happy to change the claim. But in laughing at the letter, an idea was born: why not turn this into a tongue-in-cheek campaign against our old adversary? They’ve been trying to hold us and other competition back for 15 years, but we’re not going away. The result was an email campaign that’s really resonated with potential customers, won an award, and gathered a fair bit of positive PR.”
Witty and acerbic from start to finish, commentators were impressed by the email’s successful conversion of a possible legal challenge into a marketing coup, with “a backhanded riposte Roger Federer could be proud of”.
Read below for some of the judges’ comments:
**“Excellent marketing! The subject line got me to open the mail. The savings was stressed and I got a little laugh at the expense of your competitor” **– Mindy Stern
“A masterclass in marketing” – Paul Elliot Smith
“Possibly the best marketing email ever” – Steff Easom
Take a look at our broadband deals to see how much cheaper than BT we really are.
