Lunesta (eszopicione) is a prescription sleep aid. Lunesta launched in 2005. While the market for sleep aids is large, it is a very crowded field with several leading prescription sleep aids, OTC sleep aids and home remedies.
The Challenge
The challenge for Lunesta was not only to create a successful launch in a crowded category but also to maintain persistency with consumers who became patients.
The Solution
Lunesta worked on a multi-layered, multi-phased online marketing campaign designed to create awareness, stimulate conversion and maintain persistency through relationship marketing. Campaign elements were tracked and measured using e-tractions platform, EnterAct™. The resulting analytics allowed the team to optimize media and messaging for maximum efficiency.
Key Program Elements
The brand team seeded the market prior to launch with an unbranded site, www.getsomesleep.com. Registration on this site gave prospective patients the opportunity to opt-in to receive additional information and offers related to product launch. The registration form gave Lunesta the opportunity to gather profiling information and a database of opt-in subscribers. By the time of launch, Lunesta had 25,000 registered users with profiles on gender, income and insomnia symptom.
To launch Lunesta, the team deployed multiple online media designed to continue to build the opt-in database and support the offline awareness campaign. The online media mix included co-registration, banner advertising and search. Email was used to gather additional demographic, psychographic and behavioral data from opt-in registrants.
By the end of the launch year, Lunesta enjoyed over 1 million opt-in registrants in the database. Additionally, the online marketing efforts delivered a significant lift in awareness, especially on specific brand attributes.
The online marketing goal for Lunesta in the following year was to harvest the database. A complementary strategy of fun/sell was established to engage the registrants through a series of relationship emails. The "fun" was a short interactive game designed to simultaneously engage and inform. The "sell" was typically an economic incentive in the form of a coupon. At the end of the second calendar year, the Lunesta database held almost 2 million opt-in registrants. The ongoing relationship marketing email campaign enjoys lower unsubscribe rates and higher open and click-through rates than the industry average.
