Foundry: 'Fall in Love' with Modo digital campaign

Black dog with his tongue out on an orange background

Service and project type

Integrated campaign | Strategy, creative, email, social, paid media

Relationship

Foundry is a software business that provides visual effects and computer graphics software to the creative industries. Their products are industry standard in film, television, product design, and other creative industries. We have been a partner agency to Foundry since 2018, retained to support them across all areas of their digital marketing, from SEO and social through to website UX, design, and more.

Problem

One of Foundry’s key products is Modo – a versatile and powerful 3D modeling online software that is used by character designers, product designers, and other creatives in a huge range of industries from film and video games through to fashion, technology, and architecture.

Despite facing stiff competition, there is an opportunity to stand out. Modo users have provided valuable feedback, which presents a unique chance for improvement and growth. By addressing these concerns and implementing positive changes, sales and overall sentiment can be strengthened.

Foundry had begun a major product roadmap to completely overhaul Modo. They are moving towards a completely new version: Modo 17.0. Along the way there would be new versions of Modo 16 and Foundry wanted to communicate these changes to the Modo community, especially those who had switched to other tools.

The aim was to drive excitement and positive sentiment and re-engage the community. The desired outcome was to generate trials of Modo 16.1 among lapsed customers via email, upgrades to Modo 16.1 among existing users, and new sales of Modo 16.1.

Solution

To coincide with the release of Modo 16.1 and the reveal of the Modo 17.0 product roadmap we created an integrated campaign using email marketing and organic and paid social to reengage the Modo audience.

Based on our understanding of the pain points current and lapsed customers had with Modo, our objective was to make people ‘Fall Back In Love With Modo’.

We had three distinct audiences to reach:

Lapsed users – People who have been Modo customers, but had cancelled their subscription and moved on.
Former triallists – People who had taken a free trial of Modo but hadn’t converted into a paying user.
Existing users of Modo – Users on Modo 16.0 or earlier.

We developed a comms framework to align messaging to the different needs and pain points of these audiences, with clear comms objectives to help overcome barriers to conversion.

Considering a limited budget and the desire for a year-long campaign, we strategically focused on email marketing as the core element of our strategy, crafting the best email marketing campaign to maximise their budget.

Foundry has a large and well-segmented email database, which meant we could easily create full campaigns with distinct creative and messaging for the audiences.

Organic social was used to support the launch alongside the email campaigns, with paid media supporting later in an effort to retarget the audience and drive action.

We then developed three distinctive creative routes for the campaign, all leaning into the theme of love (to different degrees) for the client to choose from. Throughout the campaign, we have also provided design and copywriting support to create necessary assets alongside Foundry’s in-house team.

Results

The campaign got off to a great start when it launched in mid-February 2023. Within the first month, emails to all audiences saw a remarkable level of engagement with open rates between 37% and 48%.

We also saw a considerable number of trials generated as well as sales:

Unsubscribe rates from the emails across all audiences were extremely low, averaging about 0.4% – indicating that our approach was relevant and engaging for the audiences
70 completed trial downloads on the campaign landing page
This ultimately helped lead to over $280k in sales, with improved engagement rates across all channels.

As the campaign continues we will be A/B testing emails and paid creative to refine the approach and drive on towards the campaign’s email marketing objectives for the year.