Think revenue in upper right corner, lost revenue bottom left, boredom bottom right, and apathy top left.
Posts Tagged ‘Direct Mail’
The rubber meets the road…
These days everyone has a formula for marketing success and no two are exactly alike. We either adapt our clients to our direct marketing approach, or adapt strategy to the goals set forth by the client. Giving clients solid advice along backed by previous campaign metrics creates an healthy partnership and solid dialog marketing campaigns. It takes a delicate touch to offer advice without talking down to clients. Many agencies fail here. You should hear our clients relay stories of agency egos the size of conference rooms.
Revenue generation is a team sport. Marketing starts with solid prospect or customer lists.* High mail-to-web rates drive these same prospects and customers into the marketing funnel.** Sticky microsites educate these folks and prime them for discussions with sales. Sales cycles grow shorter as sales gets into deeper and deeper conversations. Decision makers and those that influence the purchase get involved. Revenue is won. It all started with established campaign expectations and a solid customer-vendor relationship.
Not all clients buy into our approach 100%, but together we find ways to leverage our creative work to meet organizational milestones and goals. At the end of the day it’s about communicating expectations, setting goals before the first brainstorming session, and executing against those goals. That’s where the rubber meets the road.
*Marketers spend far too little time cleaning lists. Traditional direct mail took a shotgun approach. You could afford bogus data, because the per unit costs were somehow justified. Not so with dimensional mail. Higher-end mail pieces help keep lists smaller with better, targeted contacts.
**Once you have a solid list it’s up to us (VLG or whatever agency you use) to deliver a value proposition to those future/current customers. Look for mail-to-web (or visit rates) over 20%. Our Dialog Marketing gives you a leg up with real-time behavior tracking online and notifications via email, SMS, or RSS feed.
Our Goal: 100 Fans
Scratching your head to figure out how to measure social media’s revenue impact? You’re not alone. High-level stats may look like this:
Twitter: Following 46/Followers 153
Facebook Group: Fans 80**
LinkedIn Group: Members 68
SMS Subscribers: 24
Newsletter Subscribers: 623
What do they really mean? Our numbers (above) compare favorable to others our size, I think. Actually, I don’t really know what the competition is doing, or if that’s the right measuring stick for our efforts. We don’t approach this in a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses way. Our measure so far is on quality. People that follow us, are fans, are members or subscribers appear to be really, really smart.
As a small organization we can follow a prospect through our social media pipeline through to sale, but we have a harder time quantifying the sunk costs of getting them there. We can only imagine the complexity of a larger organization’s social media efforts. It seems obvious to us that social media is about small, highly interactive groups. So maybe corporate marketing shouldn’t only the social media face of the company. Maybe it’s the local franchisee, the product manager, or the field marketer. I don’t think anyone has all the answers yet. If you come across someone that does, be suspicious, very suspicious.
We’ve taken a goal-based approach that walks the line between strategy and necessity. Much of our social media experience/experiment seeks to prove out different strategies before we suggest solutions to our clients. We practice what we preach. We also need to be in the space out of necessity. Each day social media encroaches on marketing budgets and spend, taking time and attention away from quantifiable marketing efforts.
You can do both and should. Pull together a strategy that closes the loop from direct outbound to social media inbound to quantifiable results. Pull together small teams and micro-campaigns to leverage social media, because the life-cycle of a advertising campaign is shrinking.
(We’ll take a closer look at the public’s attention span next week after the holiday, because people have shorter attention spans going into a three-day holiday.)
**Finally, we need 20 more fans to reach a 100 in Facebook. Why is this important? It takes one hundred fans to earn your way into a vanity URL for your group. Vanity URLs, custom tabs and fb applications are another reason we should be excitedly cautious about the evolved Internet today. Thanks for that little bit of advice @alexrudloff.
Why Traditional Could Work
The chorus line seems committed to using social media to do something, push out news, provide consumer alerts, deliver content to loyal customers, fish for new business, establish a thought leadership role in your industry—all that. It’s a great social experiment and shakes the foundation of an industry wedded to tradition, high margins and the intrinsic value of creative.
Nobody should draw any conclusions yet about social media’s impact on the bottom line. It’s too soon to tell. So, we’re going to table social media and focus on something old and familiar.
You might not be talking about traditional media during budget talks, but you should be.
Traditional media, direct mail, radio, outdoor, t.v., etc, should evolve as the industry evolves. Attention should be paid to teaching these old dogs new tricks.
I recently moved into a new home and I’m new to the neighborhood. Lucky for me local retailers were quick to realize I’d made the move and were kind enough to send me loads of junk mail for this service or that. Those went straight to the recycling bin. The only company that didn’t hit me with any “new” neighbor offers was Lowe’s. I guess they figured I didn’t need an incentive to visit their store. They were right.
While driving in the car last week a local radio station listed the top 10 most memorable radio jingles in the local market. I knew six of them by heart, but there is no way I’d consider buying a car based on a jingle. I’m not even sure a jingle would get me to the dealership. I pass 10 of them on my way home, so why not start my car buying experience at one of those?
Next to newspapers, television as a vehicle to deliver advertising is taking a beating in the press. Numbers are off and with good reason. I get a kick out of ads, but in this economy I’m brand neutral and buy on price. When I see a cartoon bear using toilet paper in the woods, I think, “Does a bear shit in the woods?” Yes, yes it does.
Outdoor is prevalent here in Texas, more so than in other parts of the world. It’s fascinating to see what and how outdoor is used to promote events, products, service and the like. My favorite are the signs that have an 800 number in 12 point font. What were they thinking? I’m already sending and text and talking on the phone. How in the world am I going to pull out a pin and write down the number.
Most traditional media fails to hit its mark. Media buyers and sellers will obviously disagree, but it’s true. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Direct mail needs to be relevant, personal and drive the recipient into a call to action. We happen to recommend the web be the destination. Television needs to go shorter or longer. Give me a 10 or 15 second spot, or a 2 minute short. Either hit me over the head or tell me a story, but don’t have two birds talk to me for 30 seconds. Radio could be in trouble. Any ideas on how to help them? Finally, outdoor. Just put a unique URL up there, like www.GetBackToHere.com. To where? I don’t know, but I’ll find out. Or, you could just use plastic cows that can write, they just can’t write well.
We don’t have all the answers. Heck, we may only have a few. That’s the point. In the euphoria of social media, let’s not forget that traditional media can deliver value. We just need to reinvent how and what we deliver.
Interactive Going Up, DM Too
BtoB, the magazine for marketing strategists, just updated their “2009 Marketing Priorities and Plans” to reflect some mid-year trends. You can download the report here.
Our own straw poll came to the same albiet unscientific conclusion. Marketing spend in the second half of 2009 will be up. Online marketing spend will go up. Direct marketing spend will go up.
We’re feeling pretty good about the direction we’ve taken as an interactive marketing firm. Three years ago we decided to focus our efforts on what we saw as two converging trends in B2B marketing–an increase in online and direct marketing spend. Hey, sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.
In her BtoB article, Ms Maddox asked Jim Prothe of Model Metrics to comment on this trend.
“We really didn’t face any significant budget cuts this year, but there is much more scrutiny placed on what we’re spending on and what we’re getting for it,” Mr Prothe said.
Mr Prothe’s right on the money.
Marketers need to deliver results in the downturn, but shouldn’t that be true regardless of economic climate. Number of leads, cost per opportunity, cost per lead, cost per target, impression, click-through, touch and on and on are all the product of a down economy and we hope they stay.
Last year our customers went to trade shows. This year they are hosting virtual events. Last year they sent team members to thought-leadership conferences. This year they fired those same people.
The moral of the story is make metrics your new best friend. Marketing will no longer be a safe haven for Liberal Arts majors, but a stat-heavy job that will justify its existence at the end of every program and every quarter. Turn your marketing department into a revenue center, because if you remain a cost center you’ll never get the budget you need to justify your existence. No amount of money fed to a cost center will get credit for generating revenue.
Start with highly targeted direct marketing campaigns that drive web traffic and demand directly to the sales team. Put the onus on sales to close when you set them up.
Liz Couldn’t Be More Wrong
Elizabeth Lomard* is right about one thing–you can save money by sending postcards instead of letter-sized mailers. (Read her blog post here.) Both fail to generate a response north of 5% on the best of days. Improved ROI through cost savings puts the bar pretty low for anyone trying to boost revenue through direct marketing. To be fair let’s look at here theory point-by-point.
It all amounts to cheaper junk mail, not better.
1. Her: Reduce the size of your mailing list to target only those likely to buy. Us: If you expect a low response to the mailer this might be the right approach. That’s the status quo. Spend time and money verifying the quality of a larger list. A big list comes in handy when you have a double-digit response rate. (We wrote about the dangers of segmentation.)
2. Her: Mail First Class postcards instead of letter-sized mailers.
3. Her: Change flats to letter-sized, which is basically the same point she made in point no. 2. Us: Another drop in response that struggles to justify the reduction in cost.
4. Her: Add a message to the outside of your mailer when sending enveloped mail. Us: Really? “Reply by May 1, 2009 to get this amazing offer.” The public is on to us. Once you start down this path you’ll wake up one morning a used car salesman. Not really, but this again suggests a cheap trick instead of true one-to-one marketing.
5. Her: Add a phone number, reply card, or coupon as calls-to-action. Us: Move you target audience to the web. That’s where the real fun begins. Track, learn, listen. All are more important than talking when running a direct marketing program. Be proactive in your response and you’ll boost revenue. That’s the best ROI you can get. Cost cutting is temporary; revenue growth provides higher LCV.
*Elizabeth works for Pitney Bowles who sells postage scales and other tools needed by direct marketers that use metered and First Class mail. She might be touting the party line. Not her fault.