3 Steps to Data Mining

Data mining. It is the foundation of great personalized marketing, but it strikes fear into the hearts of many marketers. The reality is that this fear is unfounded since data mining is well within the grasp of any sized marketer. 

Let’s break it down into three simple steps.  

1. Find out what’s in there. 

The first step is to understand the field headings in your database. Most databases have basic information like name, address and purchase history. Are you also capturing information such as age, gender and home ownership? What data do you actually have?

2. Ask questions. 

Knowing what data you have tells you the types of queries you can run. Running queries simply means asking questions of the data. If you are a retailer you might ask, “Which customers purchased hardwood flooring last month?” If you know that these customers are also likely to purchase area rugs and floor conditioning products, this gives you a great start.

3. Look for relationships. 

The next step is to run data sorts. Is there a relationship between hardwood flooring and gender? How about income? Are customers more likely to purchase hardwood flooring at different times of year than others? 

Even basic software like Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access provides sorting capabilities. Or you might want to purchase add-on data mining modules or third-party software. If you need to outsource, there are plenty of companies that specialize in this process for very reasonable costs.

Get Curious!

So get curious. Take a few hours to run a variety of sorts just to see what you can find. 

Once you know what’s in your data, you’ve asked questions of your data, and discovered relationships within the data, it’s time to act on what you find. That curiosity could make a big difference to the bottom line.

Case Studies: Consumers Use QR Codes

QR Codes give shoppers and other consumers access marketing or product information from their mobile phones, but do consumers actually prefer them? Will they scan these codes when other ways to access the information are available? For many, the answer is yes!

Let’s look at three real-life examples: 

1. One marketer sent a holiday card to its customers with an invitation to login to a personalized URL to select a charity to receive a donation in their name. Of those responding to the campaign, 11% chose to log in by scanning a QR Code rather than typing in the personalized URL.

2. An online educational institution serving the high school market wanted to boost enrollment. It sent a promotional campaign inviting students and their parents to log in to a personalized URL to learn more about online education and enter a sweepstakes to win an iPad2.  More than one-third (37%) of the logins came via QR Code.

3. In order to refresh its retail location, an herbal supplements and vitamin company wanted to find out what products and services its customers were looking for that might be missing from its existing mix. To find out, it sent a survey via personalized URL to nearly 20,000 contacts. QR Code scans accounted for almost 20% of all PURL visitors.

We could give lots more examples, but you get the idea. People love mobile, but they don’t love typing in long web addresses. If you provide them with a way to skip right to the content they are looking for, they’ll very likely to take it, especially when they are responding to a personalized URL campaign. That’s a huge benefit of QR Codes. 

This can also lead to an elevated response rate to the overall campaign. Why? Because the easier it is to respond to a marketing message (including multiple ways to respond), the more responses you’re going to get.  

Avoid a Font-O-Rama

We’ve all seen documents that use more fonts per square inch than legibility (let alone aesthetics) can handle, resulting in a garish “font-o-rama.” This not only looks unprofessional, but it serves as a barrier to marketing success. Good typography equals good communication. 

Graphic designers understand that type often obeys the law of engineering, “form follows function.” That is, a typeface should be appropriate to what the typesetter designed it to do. At the same time, that form needs to be aesthetically pleasing. The basis of good typographic design is balancing the “logistic” requirements of the document with what is pleasing and attractive.

For example, Bell Gothic was designed in 1938 to improve the legibility of phone directories, as well as provide economy of space. Frutiger was designed to make airport signage easy to read from a distance. Interstate, which was derived from Highway Gothic (the official font of the U.S. Highway Administration), served the same purpose for U.S. highways. Courier inspires a sense of nostalgia. 

(For more on the history of Western Typefaces, click here.)

When choosing a font, think like a designer and choose a font appropriate to the task at hand. It’s like clothing. What we wear should be appropriate to the weather as well as to the context (formal versus casual), but also be attractive. Just as with clothing, some fonts look dated and scream “1970s,” the typographic equivalent of a plaid leisure suit.

Typefaces, like anything else, go in and out of fashion. While it’s tempting to think that no one really pays close attention to fonts, there is often an unconscious visceral reaction to bad type, not unlike the unconscious reactions that we have to poor color combinations or out-of-date clothing. 

Understanding how font choice affects the perception and reception of a document is one of the crucial elements to good design. You should not treat it lightly. If you need help, we can recommend a good designer to help you. 

Every font tells a story—is it the story you and your client want to tell? Or do you want people to say, “Your mother dresses you funny”?

QR Codes Add Interactivity to Print

What if you could put interactivity into your printing at essentially no cost? Sound too good to be true? Then you haven’t heard about QR Codes. 

You may have seen them in magazine ads or on billboards. Increasingly, they are showing up on business cards and marketing collateral. Even in email. When your customers scan these codes with their cellphone cameras, something interactive happens. They are taken to a website. They access a coupon. They see a video. 

QR Codes act as an immediate response mechanism for your print ads, bulletin boards, marketing collateral, and corporate identity materials. People don’t need to wait until they get home or back to the office. They can access the content right where they are. 

Because QR Codes are simply 2D barcodes, they cost nothing to produce and add to your print materials. In a free QR Code generator like Kaywa or Inigma, simply enter the URL to which you want people to be sent, hit “get code,” and insert the resulting .jpg or .png into the layout. Yes, it’s that easy. 

Here are some places you can add QR Codes to spice up previously static print items: 

• Sell sheets. Send people to a YouTube video to see a demo of the product.
• Business cards and letterhead. Let customers add your contact information to their phones with a single click.
• Trade show materials. Allow booth visitors to see your entire product line and pricing right from the trade show floor!
• Window clings. Give passersby access to discount codes that encourage them to come in and buy. Or let them connect with you on Facebook or Twitter.
• Direct mail pieces. Make it easy to sign up for sweepstakes, access location maps or discounts, or add events to their calendars.   

The possibilities are endless. The best news is, QR Codes are free!

Steps to Writing Great Marketing Copy

Want to boost the effectiveness of your marketing? Techniques like 1:1 personalization, trigger-based delivery, and multi-channel marketing are a great foundation. But even these won’t amount to much if they aren’t paired with something equally important. That’s good marketing copy. 

Here are some fundamental principles of writing great copy that will help your message command attention: 

• Be imaginative. It’s easy to say the same thing in the same way all the time. Break out of the mold. Look for unconventional ways to present your message.
  
• Be a salesman. Cute and clever doesn’t get you anywhere by itself. Your copy still has to motivate recipients to take action. Be creative, but also be clear. Sell benefits. Give an overt call to action.
  
• Put the customer front and center. Make the customer the center of the message. Talk about their problems, their challenges, and their bottlenecks. Let them identify with the message, then talk about how your products and services make life better.  
• Build trust. Part of building a brand and gaining repeat customers is establishing loyalty and trust. Represent your products in a way that is accurate, helpful, and maintains your customers’ confidence.
  
• Hire a professional editor. Make sure your copy meets professional standards. Someone who is “good at grammar” isn’t sufficient. When it comes to marketing, there are rules for punctuation, capitalization, and usage that only professionals know. Make sure you are using them. 

Of course, there are other elements to great print marketing, as well. Good layout. Interesting graphics. Compelling offer. But great copy ties it all together.