insights.
Jul 21st
In a recent post from Seth Godin, the influential author and speaker divulges a main difference between mass marketers and direct marketers: the process they follow in creating and scaling their message to reach their audiences.
The comparison below is based on Godin’s main points:
Mass Marketing: |
Direct Marketing: |
| Bets on large-scale deployment to achieve success. | Relies on initial small-scale testing to achieve success. |
| Needs heavy initial resource allocation to push message to entire audience, across multiple channels, simultaneously. | Needs low initial resource allocation; deployment scaled to entire audience as results are proven. |
| Relies on achieving results on the first attempt. | Continually improves results by tracking, measuring, and revising. |
| Success (brand awareness, “buzz,” and sometimes conversion rate) not determined until end of campaign. | Success (conversion rate) is determined at beginning, based on test results. |
With tighter budgets and continued pressure to produce measurable results, the safer, predictable direct marketing process would seem a no-brainer. However, everyone from small business owners dabbling in marketing to seasoned advertising veterans are tempted to rely on their personal taste and gut instinct to determine what will appeal to and motivate the masses. This temptation is natural, but not justifiable, according to Godin:
“The key distinction [between direct marketing and mass marketing] is when you know it’s going to work. The mass marketer doesn’t know until the end. The direct marketer knows in the beginning. The mass marketer is betting on thousands of tiny cues, little clues, and unrecorded (but vital) conversations. The direct marketer is measuring conversion rates from the first day.
“That’s the reason we often default to acting like mass marketers. We’re putting off the day of reckoning, betting on the miracle around the corner, spending our time and energy on the early steps without the downside of admitting failure to the boss.
“Of course, just because it’s our default doesn’t mean it’s right. Business to business marketing is almost always better if you treat it like direct marketing. Most websites that do conversion as well. Same with non-profit fundraising.”
So, as it turns out, the distinction between mass and direct marketing is less about the size of your audience, and more about the process you follow to determine the right messaging for them. Are you willing to devote the time needed to test your message, and do you have the humility and persistence needed to acknowledge a failed test and try again? If so, then you’re on your way to achieving more powerful, scalable marketing.
You can read Godin’s complete post here.
Jul 6th
For the marketing community, social media is the newest, shiniest toy we’ve had in a while, and most of us are rushing to learn how to utilize each new social platform to our advantage.
Marketing budgets have begun shifting as well. Of the participants in the 2009 PRWeek/MS&L Social Media Survey 31% reported shifting in marketing and communications budgets to add social media to their mix, with 48% of their social budgets being pulled from past advertising budgets, 41% from direct marketing, 29% from media buying, and 18% from PR.
Despite these budget shifts, marketing executives surveyed in the study still say they believe each of the more traditional direct marketing, advertising and PR channels have a greater impact on the success of their company or brand.
Source: 2009 PRWeek/MS&L Social Media Survey
So even though marketers believe that direct marketing and other traditional tactics are more effective, they’re willing to divert budget to social media. Is this a rational decision to test new marketing tactics, or are marketers just succumbing to peer pressure and a search for “the next big thing?”
According to the study, 39% of respondents reported that “they are not convinced of the value or ROI” of social media. This may be due to the notorious difficultly of tracking and calculating conversions influenced by social media.
There are many commonly accepted case studies that have shown effective use of social media for business initiatives, including:
With all of these business uses of social media, questions still remain about their actual revenue generation. As social marketing practices are honed and social tracking tools improve, this may change. However, it may not. Which leads us to…
Ready to test social media marketing for your organization? It's time to create a focused social marketing plan of attack.
So budgets are limited, and it’s time to start dividing your resources and time. Social marketing may be a winner for your audience and business model, and should probably be tested. So what percentages should you allocate to social marketing initiatives? Here are some suggestions:
If you’re achieving good ROIs for your direct marketing, PR or advertising, don’t reduce your budgets for these channels for something untested.
Is social marketing right for your business model and audience? There’s only one way to be sure. Start by allocating a portion of your budget, just as you would any test initiative.
Before you start, make sure you have clearly identified your objectives and success metrics. Then, instead of trying to engage in every social media platform, choose one or two specific actions to focus your efforts. Some examples:
Can you attribute new customers to your online interactions? Did traffic and conversion for your website increase? Have you increased foot traffic to your locations? If so, congratulations, it’s time to allocate more budget and increase your social marketing efforts. If not, it’s either time to test other social marketing tactics, or funnel your budget and efforts back to the marketing channels you know work for your business.
So now I want to know, what social media tactics have you tested for your business, and what type of results have you seen?
Jun 18th
The Direct Marketing Association released their annual Response Rate Trend Report this week, including some interesting findings about direct mail, email, paid search ads, Internet display ads, and telemarketing:
Perhaps the most interesting stats involve the costs of producing a lead or sale via different marketing channels. Many companies and marketers focus more on the per-piece cost of the different channels, instead of the end game of actual sales, which may account for the flood of marketing emails in my inbox/spam filter.
According to the report: “Catalogs had the lowest cost per lead/order of $47.61, just ahead of inserts at $47.69, email at $53.85, and postcards $75.32.”
What kind of response and conversion rates are you experiencing? What marketing channels are performing best for you? Share your insights by clicking the comment button.
May 18th
Mulling over your B2B lead generation process? Here are six "Ah-ha" moments to consider as you continue to improve your lead gen techniques.
Off. On. Off. On. If only lead generation were a faucet under my control. I am certainly seeing more need in our business and in our clients’ businesses for more leads, but only at specific times. Like most Business-to-Business (B2B) marketers today, my budget is still tight, but loosening up a bit, and I am always focused on the “Cha Ching,” or the ability of lead sources to produce profitable business.
This has made me rethink Mail Print’s lead generation process and I thought I would share my “Ah-ha” moments from the past several weeks:
Landing page forms only work if people give you real information. It’s really hard to communicate with someone named “No Name” at abc@abcdef.com. And, there’s no quicker way to turn off your sales team than to funnel them bogus leads. Make sure you have an automated or human filter in place to weed out invalid leads before they make it into your pipeline.
Lead generation tactics can become ineffective quickly. Always think in terms of what worked before, what is working now, and how many tests need to be in progress to be able to generate leads in the future.
It’s about so much more than just generating leads. Lead generation, lead scoring, lead nurturing and the all important “close” are really one big progression. One break in the process and good leads fall through the cracks and your ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) declines.
Having the right amount of lead flow is very important to adequately utilize inside sales teams. Unfortunately the amount of leads needed is constantly changing. There must be many levers to push and pull to keep everyone productive.
Email marketing is a fantastic lead nurturing tool, but it is worthless today as a lead generation tool. Need proof? Just try to remember the last time you used your spam folder as a shopping cart.
Packages or lumpy direct mail get past the gatekeeper. Sounds expensive, right? Yes, and that’s why it works. The administrative assistant can’t throw it away, so it ends up on the boss’ desk. For example, a new “heavy” prospecting tool that we created for Mail Print has already returned $10 for every $1 invested and we’ve only sent out 10% of what we have already paid for. Cha ching!
If you would like to see a sample of our “sneak it past the gatekeeper” direct mail piece, email me at rhondab[at]mailprint[dot]com. I’d be happy to share our latest innovation in variable data printing that seems to be confusing the heck out of gatekeepers and connecting us to senior and executive level management.
B2B lead generation is a work in process, literally. Working on both the tactics and the overall process is vital to finding the Cha Ching.
May 6th
Staying in contact with your prospects and customers is key for building and maintaining revenue. However, it can also be an ongoing challenge and resource-draw for your sales and marketing teams. Check out the video below (or here) to learn how businesses are using Mail Print’s multi-channel marketing automation system to transform their lead nurturing and customer retention into automated, repeatable processes.
Apr 20th
Duplicate prospect and customer data is a nightmare for IT and Database Marketing departments, but a requirement for some direct marketing systems. The solution? Integrated systems that use live data feeds.
There is no doubt that an enterprise data warehouse has helped countless organizations consolidate their information into one central database allowing for better analysis and use of the data. This has certainly been the case for improving targeting and segmenting of direct marketing efforts. It has also been a boon to being able to use varying messaging, imagery, offers, and even formats to improve relevancy to the targeted audiences.
Increased availability of data has lead to the usage of 10s, 100s or 1000s of variables within an individual campaign. It has also lead to a new level of complexity for automating a successful ongoing campaign that uses these variables.
Good direct marketing service providers, whether it be print, email, text messaging or direct mail, can work magic with the data… after all the data is brought into their system via a data pipe or XML stream. This often causes IT departments and data analysts to cry “Foul! You just created redundant data from what was supposed to be a single data warehouse.”
So what’s the next step in email and print automation to make sure that redundant data sources are not created? Creating a live feed that continually calls to and from your data warehouse.
We have a client who utilizes a proprietary segmentation model, as well as geographic overlays, and purchase history to determine the targeting of direct mail and email campaigns. After combining this with localized ordering, they have a wonderfully targeted, relevant communications strategy that works like magic. And best of all, their data and segmentation resides with them.
Building a continual data retrieval system is not the easiest way to feed data for automated marketing communications, but is the best way to maintain the integrity of your data warehouse.
Apr 1st
Interested in continually improving your direct marketing results? Avoid a common database and direct marketing pitfall by devoting the time needed to document your strategies and techniques.
In the past two weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of sitting down with a couple of fellow direct marketers. One is a prospective client, considering the use of variable data printing for the first time. The other is a long-time friend who needs help getting a better ROI on his direct mail and email campaigns. Both have worked in online, database or direct marketing for many years, and both have large enough budgets to really drive revenue.
Ironically, both have the same, simple problem: somewhere along the way, the “doing more with less” mantra meant the elimination of documentation. So now one has a great strategic plan (and it is documented), but failed to log all of the results over time. The other had a great testing plan, but didn’t document it, and six months later can’t remember the details regarding the target audiences.
Some of you may think this could never happen to you. I challenge you to think back to a time when your plan (and I know it was the most stellar, innovative, revenue-producing plan ever written) was modified beyond recognition by the time it got through your boss, your boss’s boss, the client, legal, compliance and the ten other stakeholders. Did you change the plan to reflect all the final decisions?
As direct and database marketing become more intricate and complex, it is impossible to remember all the detailed changes that take place over the course of the strategic planning process. If you don’t know what you did or how it worked, where does this leave you? Back at the beginning. Database and direct marketing is an iterative, building process. So no matter how frazzled, busy and stretched your marketing department becomes, don’t shortcut the documentation process and make a ginormous mistake. You’ll thank yourself for knowing exactly what you did, why you did it, and the resulting outcomes.
Ginormous as defined by Merriam Webster’s online dictionary:
Pronunciation: \jī-ˈnȯr-məs\
Function: adjective
Etymology: gigantic + enormous
Date: circa 1948
extremely large : humongous
Mar 24th
Just like milk and cookies, direct mail and email are better together.
Email is, by far, the best thing to ever hit direct marketing.
One of the newest ways we are helping our clients manage their direct communications is by helping them develop automated systems to use direct mail strategically in conjunction with email campaigns. Let me share some of the innovative ways our clients are approaching the mail/email equation:
We recently developed an automated system that generates a postcard the day after a hard bounced email. This allows our client to have their customers easily update their email addresses as soon as the old email address is no longer valid. The real beauty of this is that it is fully automated. No one has to pull a list from the Email Service Provider and send it to us. It just happens.
If a long-term customer opts-out of your email communications, what does that mean?
Our client just asks by mailing a survey after someone opts-out, allowing them to address unforeseen issues and quickly win back the appropriate customers.
Several of our clients are having success by using both email and mail in conjunction with PURLs (personalized URL), as both a way to invite their audience members to visit their personalized web sites, and to follow up with respondents to thank them for visiting and drive their next action.
This may seem simple, but one of our client’s retention marketing efforts simply consists of mailing or emailing the same information, but if they have opted in to email, they get email. If they don’t have a valid email address or if they haven’t opted in to email, they get the information mailed to them. Simple, but it works.
One of our associates recently attended Marketing Sherpa’s Email Marketing Summit in Miami. Many of the attendees wondered why a company like Mail Print would attend such an event. They thought a company named “Mail Print” would perceive email as “the enemy.” Far from it. We were probably more successful at this event than the email companies… because we get it. Our clients need more than one successful marketing tactic to drive the revenue they need to propel their companies through this recession. And, oh boy, the magic we can make by strategically planning to use the right medium for our audiences.
Mail has not died. It just has a new BFF… email.
Mar 18th
Academically speaking, the customer life cycle begins with a prospect: an interested party who may potentially need your product or service. Adept companies qualify their prospects to pinpoint their sales efforts on leads that are ready to buy, while using automated marketing tactics such as email campaigns and direct mail programs to continue to develop leads at the beginning of the buying process. Following a first purchase, a period of customer assimilation or on-boarding takes place. This is a prime time to start building loyalty and influencing ongoing purchases. Particularly adroit companies employ retention programs to continue to provide value and to educate their customers to improve cross-selling opportunities. The final frontier recognizes when a customer’s attention has waned, and alerts sales and marketing to deploy a winback strategy.
While everyone knows that it costs 6-10 times more to acquire a new customer than to maintain a loyal customer, most direct marketing is heavily weighted toward lead generation and lead nurturing. Responsibility for improving the customer experience is largely a reactive tactic left to the sales and customer service departments, which usually means trying to appease a customer after they have become dissatisfied and have a complaint.
So what’s a smart marketer to do? Take a moment to evaluate your customer life cycle in comparison to your direct marketing efforts. Where can your marketing dollars most impact revenue? Creating a chart like the one below can be helpful in identifying where spending and effort need to shift. And why not consider using some of those marketing automation techniques to trigger communications to current and lapsed customers?
Example customer lifecycle with poorly-aligned direct marketing resources.
Mar 11th
Successful personalized marketing mixes right brain logic and left brain creative.
Highly-personalized marketing with relevant messaging, images and offers dramatically increases response rates… everyone agrees on this now, right? I mean, we’ve all read the case studies and white papers that prove it.
So why isn’t everyone doing it? For one, creating a highly-personalized marketing piece requires a creative staff brave enough to reach into the cold, sterile world of databases, segmentation and matrices, and then blend the two together. This is a serious feat of right brain/left brain, inspiration/intel, balance that can be difficult to achieve. But, as the research shows, double-digit response rates are attainable….
So I cornered several of our clients that create and produce highly-personalized marketing campaigns, and asked them for the top things they’d tell creatives about creating relevant, database-driven communications.
Here are their top five suggestions, ready for you to share with your design and marketing creatives:
Get a sample of your marketing database, and review all the options available to you. A good database could include information about their purchase history, preferences, and demographics; all info you can use to make your piece more relevant. Even simple databases can be segmented to create versioned messages and images; try region, number of employees and industry.
When adding variable fields to your designs, it’s important to know just how long – or short – the text may be that pulls in for each field. Ask your database team for a report of the longest and shortest entries for each variable field, and then proof your designs with these extremes included.
Splashing your recipient’s name across your creative can definitely capture their attention, and can be done very creatively and effectively. But some of the most effective personalized communications include hundreds or thousands of variables. If you have a strong database, some internal expertise, and a good partner, it’s time to test an intensely-variable piece.
Sooner, rather than later, call the Variable Data Printer, email service provider or direct mail marketer of your choice : ), and grill them on the process your creative will go through to be produced. Chances are, there are choices you’ll make that could negatively or positively affect the resulting pieces. Special Note: Make sure to ask them the best file formats for their workflow!
As you can tell, there’s a reason personalized marketing isn’t used by all of your competitors: it’s hard. But, it’s a lot easier once you’ve done it a few times. So start by working a couple of variables into piece before advancing to that dynamic, 1,000-variable piece you’ve been dreaming of. Starting simple will also ensure your process and hardware is correct and will prevent a server meltdown (ask me about that story sometime).
Haven’t read one of those reports about personalized marketing improving response rates? Let me recommend this case study or this white paper. Want to know more or add something to the list? Use the handy comment tool below.
Photo credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dierkschaefer/ / CC BY 2.0