In Spring 2007, Mercedes-Benz launched their ultimate luxury coupé, in the form of the new CL-Class. The brief from the client was to make the target audience aware of the high level of luxury that you would experience when driving this car and to encourage test drives. It was felt that once these car connoisseurs had experienced the finish of the interior and build quality of the vehicle first hand, they would be totally sold.

Once the creatives had sat in the car, they were convinced that they really had to come up with a more powerful way of demonstrating the car’s luxury than a brochure. We created a faux-leather envelope, housing a polished chrome plate with just a contact number for a test drive. It was considered to be a first for British DM. As the recipients were actually getting their hands on the leather and chrome, it was a subtle mini-taster of the car’s luxury (the closest thing to actually experiencing the car). One of the purest forms of the DM medium.

Within the first 4 weeks, we had over 1,000 hands raised. This was a response rate of 3% that rose to an amazing 17%. It created an astonishing 167 test drive requests with the remainder asking for a brochure. The cost per response was £36 (against a benchmark of £52.55). Cost per sale of this expensive car was just £563 per incremental sale and the client reported an impressive incremental ROI of 25:1 halfway through the sales window.