5 Direct Mail “Must Dos”

Want to ensure that your direct mail is in line with today’s best practices? Here are 5 items that should be on every marketer’s “must do” list. 

1. Focus on relevance, not volume: Marketers are moving away from commoditized, undifferentiated direct mail. They are leveraging customer demographics, purchase patterns, and preferences to increase response rates and drive revenue growth. According to a March 2014 study from Adobe, “personalization” ranked #1 on marketers’ lists of priorities this year. 

2. Sometimes less is more: By focus on creating relevance, not volume, this often means smaller, more targeted mailings. Only with personalized, relevance-based marketing can you mail less and get more.

3. Think efficiency: Better data cleansing and updating of mailing lists (eliminating UAA, or “undeliverable as addressed” mail) not only increases marketing efficiency, but it saves on postage, too. 

4. Use triggered mail: Marketing effectiveness increases when you are mailing at the very time the customer is ready to buy. “Triggered” messaging does just that. Take an automotive manufacturer that sends out 1:1 mailers to alert customers when their vehicles are due for scheduled maintenance based on their last service call. Or a florist that advertises discounts to customers with family members with birthdays or anniversaries that week. Triggered mail magnifies the impact of personalization.

5. Be willing to stretch yourself: Don’t get stuck in a rut. In the same Adobe study, 54% of marketers said they believe the ideal marketer should take more risks and 45% hope to take more risks themselves. How will you know what works best for you if you don’t stretch yourself by trying something new once in awhile? 

Talk to us about new ideas and new techniques for personalizing, using triggers, and increasing the relevance of your campaigns to boost your results. 

¹ “Digital Roadblock: Marketers Struggle to Reinvent Themselves” (Adobe, March 2014)

Some Customers Still Hard to Reach by Email

Did you know that, even in today’s multichannel media environment, some customer segments are more difficult to reach by email than others? For example . . . 

• 41% of U.S. consumers aged 65+ still do not have Internet access. 
• 53% of U.S. consumers in this group do not have broadband. 
• 18% of these consumers do not have smartphones. 

Particularly for older retirees in lower income households, print remains a critical part of the multichannel mix. For many, it may be the only way to reach them. Even those who do go online may require text-only emails rather than the HTML versions many marketers are geared up to send. 

But before you write off U.S. retirees as non-email-reading, non-Internet using consumers, remember that not all consumer segments look the same. In fact, among younger, more affluent, and more educated retirees, 90% have Internet access and 82% have broadband. 

That’s higher than the U.S. adult population overall. For this segment, email is an important tool for marketing communication, both as a primary means of messaging or as a follow-up to print communications. 

So before you reach out, know your audience, their media use, and their channel preferences. It can have a critical impact on your multichannel mix.

Need help figuring it out? Give us a call. 

Want Better Results? Get Scientific!

When it comes to marketing spend, there is value in trusting your gut. But more and more marketers are looking to the numbers. 

According to a new survey by Adobe, marketers are increasingly relying on data and analytics to guide their decisions. Creativity is critical, but that creativity needs to be guided by hard numbers that tell you what looks great and what is actually working. 

Among the findings from the survey: 

• 51% of marketers rely more on data and analytics to guide their creative decisions. 
• 74% say capturing and applying data to inform and drive marketing activities is the new reality. 
• 67% say data (metrics from digital ads, campaigns, website, etc.) is informative in evolving my company's marketing creative.

When it comes to your creative direction, don’t be shooting in the dark. Let us help you develop metrics for your print campaigns so you know not just what folks in your office think is spectacular but what is actually getting results.

¹ “Digital Roadblock: Marketers Struggle to Reinvent Themselves” (Adobe, March 2014)

Counteract Commoditization with Creativity

Anyone can come up with a snazzy jingle or discount a product. Marrying great creative with insightful, database-driven personalization is more challenging. It also generates better results because the mailer is relevant, not just catchy. 

When one safety products company exchanged its static mailers for creative, highly personalized mailers, for example, the results were dramatic. Instead of receiving generic sales pitches, recipients were invited to log into their own personalized URLs where they could input company-specific data and see estimates on the impact of the technology in their own organizations. Variables included net costs saved, estimated injuries avoided, and estimated lives saved. 

By allowing recipients to see how the product directly benefits them (rather than another company or some hypothetical organization), results went through the roof. The marketer’s annual revenues grew from $6 million to $68 million in a span of five years in part due to this dramatic change in marketing strategy.

Marketers are testing elements such as size, shape, substrate, windows, “reveals” and fonts to grab attention in other ways, as well. These elements, in themselves, increase response rates, but when paired with relevant personalization, the improvement can be dramatic. 

When one financial solutions company wanted to increase participation in its “company match” 401(k) programs, for example, it paired its design changes with targeted segmentation (by participation level) and personalized content. Although the number of variables was low, the company saw a 16% boost in participation and a jump of $2 million in new contributions.

If you want results, get creative. Ditch “the usual” and look for new ways to approach the same material and get recipients to take a fresh look at the value of what you have to offer. 

Can 1:1 Printing Save You Money? Yes!

Most marketers define the success of a print marketing campaign in terms of what they gain — responses, conversions, or dollars flowing into the cash register. But you can also define success by the money you save. Let’s look at three ways 1:1 printing can improve the bottom line through cost savings, not just boosting responses and revenues.   

1. Lower cost of attrition. If your goal is to prevent customer attrition, you can evaluate the success of your campaign based on what sales stay rather than what sales merely come in. One marketer of high-end vacations saved millions, for example, by sending vacationers 100% personalized booklets that reinforce their vacation choices. Its cancellation rates plummeted, and it kept customer sales where they belonged — in its pockets.

2. Less handholding. What if you could use 1:1 printing to reduce calls to your customer service team? Questions about invoicing and payment cost real money. By personalizing its tax letters, for example, one state government’s tax bureau made these letters easier to read. The result was a noticeable drop in calls to its call centers, and the state saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

3. Faster response times. The faster customers pay, the better your cash flow. Take the example above. By using personalized printing to make its statements easier to read, this state government not only reduced the number of taxpayer calls, but it started receiving its revenues days earlier. As a result, it significantly boosted its earnings from interest. 

Not included in this case study but very real to most marketers is the fact that more on-time payments also mean less time and money spent on duplicate invoicing and follow-up calls for non-payment. 

Reducing customer attrition and making their invoices and customer statements easier to read and understand are not the “sexy” benefits of 1:1 printing we hear about the most, but they are real, bottom-line benefits that do not get talked about enough!

3 Ways to Measure Success

It is always critical to quantify the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. But how do you define success? Particularly with 1:1 printing, you have to use the right yardstick. If you are like most marketers, you might be used to thinking in terms of response rates, but let’s look at three less commonly used (but more critical) metrics to keep in mind. 

1. Cost per lead. Typically, marketers are used to thinking about cost per piece, and with traditional direct mail in the $.10 range, it’s hard for 1:1 print marketing to compete on a cost basis. But everything changes when you look at what your program costs per lead rather than per piece. 

If you mail 100,000 postcards at $.25 each (including postage), that’s a project cost of $25,000. If that campaign achieves a 1% response rate, that’s 250 leads at a cost of $100 per lead. On the other hand, if you mail 25,000 1:1 postcards at a cost of $1.00 each, that is still a project cost of $25,000. But if you achieve a 12% response rate, that’s 3,000 leads. Now your cost per lead drops to $8.33!

2. Cost per sale. Not all leads translate into sales. Divide the number of people who actually make a purchase into your total costs and this will give you the cost per sale. If only 33% of respondents to these hypothetical campaigns make a purchase, your cost per sale is $300 for the static campaign, while for the 1:1 campaign, it is $25.00. 

3. Lifetime customer value. The value of the sale often goes beyond the initial purchase. If 1:1 personalization woos the buyer of one make of car to another, and if that customer becomes loyal to that brand, the return on investment from that piece includes the value of every car purchased by that customer over his or her lifetime. This is an important metric for marketers of long-term purchases, such as automobiles, financial products, and insurance.

The bottom line? Before you measure your results in any print campaign, make sure you understand all of the available measuring sticks, then use the one(s) that are the most impactful for you. 

Creating Realistic Project Deadlines

When you start a new print project, you want to hit your deadlines, keep your sanity, and make your customers happy. Fortunately, the right amount of planning will make sure that you keep your sanity and your clients.

For your audience to receive the printed piece on time, ask yourself the following questions:

1. When do you want your audience to receive the piece?
2. Who will be writing the text, and how long will it take to produce it?
3. Who will be producing the artwork, and how long will it take to produce it?
4. Who will be doing the design and production work, and how long will that take?
5. How long will it take to print, finish, and mail the piece?

The first answer provides your end date. Once you have that, you can work backwards, adding the rest of the time estimates together to determine your start date. Pad each time estimate by a factor of 1.5 to 3 times depending on your confidence in the numbers. Write down these time estimates to create the project plan.

Once the project is complete, do a post-mortem on your estimates. Did you pretty much stay on schedule all the way to your deadline? If not, where did you get bogged down? Were the bottlenecks one-time occurrences or were they related to factors inherent in the process? If the latter, you may need to adjust your fudge factor to achieve a more realistic time estimate next time. 

Don’t beat yourself up for making mistakes. Along the way, you inevitably learned something, such as when your creative staff says, “It takes us one day to turn around the proof of concept,” they meant two days, or that you forgot to take into account transportation time when you made your project plan. If you add these facts to your next project plan, you will “gain from the pain” by learning from these experiences.

Setting Realistic Expectations for Personalization

According to one research firm, personalized printing (also called variable data printing) increases response rates by an average of 36%, average order size or value by 25%, and customer loyalty by 38%. What does this mean for you? Are these numbers that you, as a marketer, should expect to be hitting? 

Not necessarily. Even the most compelling case studies show a wide range of metrics, with successful 1:1 printing programs showing response rates, for example, from the single digits to nearly 100%. What matters isn’t one individual metric or another. It’s the overall return on investment (ROI). You can have a 4.2% response rate, and if the value of your product is high, you can have 1,000% ROI.

Let’s look at some variables associated with response rates and how they can impact results. 

Who are you sending to? If you mail to the general population, you will receive a lower response rate, even with personalized mail, than if you send to a carefully selected recipient base—say, your best customers or a carefully selected demographic sub-set of a purchased mailing list.

What is the goal you are trying to achieve? Are you trying to convince someone who has never heard of your product to make a purchase? Or are you selling consumables to customers who already own your products?  

Is the incentive inflating the response rate? One marketing services firm regularly generates 21% to 75% response rates based on offering high-value rewards like remote control cars or sets of personalized golf clubs. No wonder response rates are so high!

How much does the product cost? You will get more responses to offers for products under $50 than for high-value products and services like automobiles and financial services. 

Regional versus National. Sometimes regional marketers have a better chance at grabbing recipients’ attention just because they have a local connection. Known brands versus unknown brands make a difference, as well.  

So don’t focus compare yourself to others. Many variables can affect response rates. Your metrics will be unique to you, and in the end, your ROI is the only number that counts!