By Lekan Oguntoyinbo

Two years ago, Kaiser Permanente embarked on a difficult campaign: persuading C-level executives at several major corporations to switch health care providers. To seize the attention of the key decision makers, the company kicked off the campaign dubbed “In the Company of the Greats” by first mailing out baseballs encased in Plexiglas and embossed with the names of the targeted executives.

Along with the mailings, the campaign spun stories of brilliant, daring leadership decisions that altered the course of history. One mailing featured the legendary baseball general manager who, 60 years ago, broke the Major League’s color barrier by signing the first African-American player. The second mailing contained a paperweight that included a quote from the woman executive widely credited with turning around one of the world’s largest printing-equipment manufacturers. The campaign was bold, charming and effective, generating numerous leads for the health care provider as well as additional requests for the glass-encased baseballs.

“I’m not going to get an appointment with a CEO by offering him a glow pen,” says Spyro Kourtis, president and CEO of the Hacker Group, which devised the Kaiser campaign. “I’m either getting the appointment by offering something substantial or by offering some information of value to his company.”

And Kourtis echoes a number of his peers. Dimensional mail, also known as lumpy mail, remains the medium of choice for many business-to-business marketers looking to capture the attention of key decision makers.

“The difference between flat mail and dimensional mail is that dimensional mail gets opened more,” says Harvey Hirsch, president and owner of DigitalDimensions3, a Lyndhurst, New Jersey, direct marketing firm that specializes in business-to-business marketing. In fact, according to the Direct Marketing Association, dimensional mail produced an average response of 4.66 percent in 2005. In contrast, the DMA reported, postcard mail had a 1.59 percent response rate. B-to-B direct mail fared only slightly higher with a 2.05 percent response rate.

“My philosophy is, if it looks like a sales pitch, you’ve failed,” adds Hirsch. “We put the wow factor’ into direct mail.”

Not all personalized or dimensional mail uses lumps or bulges to get the point across, of course. Perfect Image, a printing company in Atlanta, used bright-red cloth envelopes to augment its message with one of its clients, a major retailer that had hosted a vendor fair. The envelopes, sprinkled with white stars, presented a very personalized message that was well received and appreciated. Delivering timely, focused printed pieces that communicate for their clients makes Perfect Image a valuable partner. This presentation showed that “we cared about their business” and according to Lynn Stafford, the customer relationship manager of the company, “it played a small part in Perfect Image’s business with that retailer increasing threefold in one year.”