The idea came to Shawn Burst in the shower. There he was, silently brainstorming a name for his new marketing technology company when he spied a toy rubber duck on the shower floor.

“I started thinking about how ducks fly in formation, how that related to our approach to co-op mailing,” says Burst. In that instant, Dukky, Burst’s cutting-edge marketing technology company, was hatched.

Cross-channel marketing evangelists

Three years later, the Louisiana organization has grown and expanded its mission — but at its core, Dukky continues to be among the industry’s most vocal evangelists for (and creative coordinators of) flashy, smart and in-your-face cross-channel marketing campaigns.

Dukky technology acts as an add-on to traditional marketing tactics like direct mail and allows them to go viral, leveraging a company’s current customers to market their promotions to their friends through social media.

Not long ago, Burst’s company joined with the owners of a chicken-themed fast-food franchise in metro New Orleans. Although the two men already owned two of the chicken franchises, they wanted to open a third and quickly attract foot traffic.

After an in-store sign-up sheet effort gathered only 150 names, the franchise owners turned to Dukky, and Burst’s team quickly went to work. The company designed a marketing strategy centered on mailing 5,000 postcards to a list of local women ages 30 to 40 with a household income of $40,000-plus.

But these weren’t ordinary cards. “They were four-inch by six-inch, colorful, and covered in plastic, with perforated coupons you could break off and bring into the store to redeem,” says Renee Hall, Dukky vice president of business development.

The mail pieces also featured a PURL, or personalized URL, that included the customer’s name in the domain. The mail piece instructed them to visit their personalized microsite for additional coupons and a chance to win a sweepstakes.

“At first glance, it gave a good impression. At second glance, it was a good offer and the customer was encouraged to go online to activate the card,” says Hall.

An astounding 22 percent went to the microsite’s first landing page. The next step was an opportunity to share the offer with friends via Facebook and Twitter, or on 263 other social networking options, as well as SMS and e-mail. Users were enticed to share the offer with the promise that doing so would enter them into a sweepstakes to win free chicken for a year.

Encouraging natural sharing

Dukky technology made the sharing process easy with the click of the preferred social icon or e-mail from the landing page, including the ability to upload e-mail contact lists for some webmail services. (While it does not track how many people were e-mailed, it knew who had forwarded the offer.)

By integrating the social sharing element into this campaign, visits to the microsite reached 14,124, a 280-percent response from the original 5,000 postcards. The 1,300 coupon redemptions were split evenly between those who responded directly to the postcard and those who came in through online outreach on social networks and through e-mail.

After four weeks, the franchise owners had 3,400 new names for their database and knew which of the originally targeted customers had been the most influential in promoting the offer to their friends. These brand evangelizers received an extra reward.

Additionally, due to the questions asked during the activation process, the restaurant owners knew which location customers intended to visit.

The total response from the direct mail respondents coupled with that of their friends far exceeded the results that could be expected if just one channel had been employed, especially considering a third-party list was used.

Goosing direct mail

“We’re big fans of direct mail. If it has a good design and a good offer, it will drive a very cost-effective response, especially when leveraged with a tool like Dukky,” notes Hall.

The case study for this campaign recently won the 2010 Direct Marketing Best Practices award from PODi, the Digital Printing Initiative, which hailed it as “an impressive example of a fully integrated multichannel direct marketing campaign with viral components.”

“We see some of the most successful campaigns are now involving direct mail, Facebook ads, web-based ads and calls to action on their company website, rather than trying to bank success on one tactic,” Hall says.