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.
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 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
Mar 1st
And the winners are... the direct marketers whose 2010 marketing tactics reflect the lessons learned during 2009.
We recently received an email from the KCDMA (the local chapter of the Direct Marketing Association) notifying us that our three entries in their 2010 AMBIT competition are all winners. The awards ceremony is still more than a month away, so we’ll have to wait to find out the exact trophies we’ll be bringing home (we’re going for the gold!)
The notification email made me think back to last year’s big winners, and the direct marketing lessons each one represented. Unlike many competitions, which focus more on the aesthetic value of entries, the DMA competition is heavily-weighted towards actual results, such as response rates, ROI and revenue generation. So, the top awards of 2009 recognized direct marketing campaigns that really made a financial impact for businesses. Here are two lessons learned from 2009’s winners:
As Sprint’s Best In Show winner illustrated, direct mail marketing with substance (read “size”) can help you get your message past gatekeepers and make an impression on the decision makers. Like other bulky mail successes, Sprint’s “PB&J Wireless Integration” campaign made up for a high cost-per-piece with incredible response rates. The key to making a bulky piece like this worth it’s weight? Make sure your marketing database is clean and targeted and your piece is eye-catching and memorable.
Mail Print’s Most Innovative Solution award winner was one several entries that highlighted how personalized marketing can increase response rates. However, I think it was singled out for the Most Innovative Solution award because of the 5% purchase rate it achieved. The awarded campaign for the new Gladstone Community Center used personalized direct mail and PURLs (see our Portfolio for samples) to generate leads from a highly-targeted list. The key? Create a profile of the most likely purchaser of your product and service, and use demographic and geographic list selection to build a marketing database of people who match this profile. Then, market to them with highly-relevant messaging.
I’m looking forward to watching this year’s ceremony to see how many companies parlayed the lessons learned at last year’s competition into their past year’s initiatives. What direct marketing lessons did you learn during 2009, and how are you implementing them during 2010?
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Feb 22nd
Using the recipient’s name is an easy way to make your direct mail and email marketing relevant to the recipient, but I am often asked, “How do I use my data to create a more personalized direct marketing experience?”
The answer lies in using your data. I know many people have a hard time making the connection between “using data” and how that translates into variable direct marketing, so let’s look at some examples:
1) Getting people to interact with your web site is great, but making them search for information that you should already know… not cool. (And not personalized or relevant.)
In the personalized email below, you’ll see all the variable information highlighted, including the location, price, discounted savings, show logos, dates and even a Personalized URL The recipient doesn’t have to go to a web site and then search for the information that applies to them.
By the way the video that plays at the Personalized URL, is a variable video. The only video that plays is the one for the location of the recipient. They don’t have to select or weed through the videos of shows that aren’t coming to their area. Check it out at: www.BroadwayForASong.com/KristinaSmith.
2) Write copy for each audience as if you were speaking directly to a recipient within that audience. The example below is tailored to families. It speaks specifically to the amenities that a family will value, not to singles or seniors, and it certainly doesn’t try to address all the audiences at the same time.
3) Location, location, location. When proximity is important, tell them just how close they are.
4) All customers are not created equal, so why would you offer them all the same thing?
5) If nothing else, always use their name. It’s easy to get creative with imagery, but don’t forget basic copywriting techniques, like using their name within the text.
6) And finally, just for fun, the piece below contains over 75 variables to make the direct mail piece relevant to the recipient. Can you find them all? I’ll give you a hint… there is variable copy within variable copy.
Using variable data in mail, email and personalized web pages becomes much easier when you understand how to apply what you already know to create relevant marketing materials. The significant improvement in response and purchase rates makes it well worth the effort.
Feb 8th
The use of variable data printing for personalized offers, bar codes, imagery and messaging has proven to drive significant traffic to casinos.
It’s no secret that my company, Mail Print, works in the casino marketing space providing variable data printing, variable data email and PURLs. Whether you love the gaming industry or hate it, you have to admire some of the forward-thinking ways they employ direct marketing, and specifically the use of their rich customer databases to deploy personalized offers and messages.
Our casino marketing clients consistently receive 10-30% response rates on their direct mail and email programs. Here are just some of the ways they do it:
So what’s next for casino marketers? Test, test, test and test some more. You can’t get too comfortable with what is working today in casino marketing and neglect figuring out what will work in the future.
Double-digit response rates start with a strong customer database. To emulate a successful casino marketer, gather info about your customers with each transaction or interchange, and then use it to create targeted and personalized marketing communications.
Test something new! There’s no reason a B2B or B2C marketer can’t steal a tactic from the casino marketing playbook, such as a personalized direct mail piece, pull-tab, scratch off, or Personalized URL.
Jan 25th
Automated marketing campaigns. Flexible customization options. API integrations. It turns out that conveying the benefits and features of a marketing communications portal is difficult without some visuals. So, we created a video about our solution for marketing campaign management, digital asset management, local store marketing and printing management. Critiques welcome….