Jigsaw figured out the puzzle – multichannel marketing is where it’s at

Online business models may have taken a beating in recent years, but there’s always room for a cool idea. And what could be more cool than community-generated content? One recent success story in this area comes from Jigsaw, an online service that allows salespeople to buy and trade business cards, giving each other the 411 on the right people to contact at corporations across the United States.

You’d expect such a 21st-century idea to have a 21st-century marketing plan. And, of course, it does. But for Jigsaw founder and CEO Jim Fowler, that means a healthy dose of direct mail.

In 2003, the former salesman dreamed up Jigsaw.com as the solution to every salesperson’s biggest headache – trying to find the right person at the right company with the right contact information to make the big sale.

Today, the San Mateo, Calif., company’s database includes 5.3 million company contacts, most with up-to-date, direct-dial phone numbers and e-mail addresses, contributed and kept current by users. So Jigsaw sells nothing that exists in the physical world.

But Fowler still uses terra firma means to attract new members to Jigsaw. In fact, in 2005, Jigsaw’s marketing team performed an experiment to determine what mix of multichannel marketing would do the best job attracting “members,” as Jigsaw refers to its customers/contributors. The company, which previously had used online and telephone marketing, ventured into direct mail because, Fowler says, it had the data at its disposal.

The surprise? Direct mail, as part of a multichannel mix of e-mail and phone calls, generated a higher response and conversion rate than any medium alone. So much for logic.

The bulk of Jigsaw users are individuals who either pay $25 monthly for a set number of contacts or who “play” by trading information in return for contacts. The larger the number of members, the bigger the database grows. Today, Jigsaw has 167,500 members. But to make its revenue model work, Jigsaw also depends on corporate accounts, which pay from $5,000 to more than $100,000, depending upon the number of employees the companies enroll.