5 Best Practices in Direct Mail Design
I just read this article on the 5 Best Practices in Direct Mail Design and had to pass it along. With all of the digital advances in direct marketing grabbing our attention (and for good reason), including triggered communications/emails, it’s nice to re-visit what makes the printed direct mail piece work — especially one that’s tied into a multichannel strategy. Here I go again on that integration soapbox!
One or all of these 5 tips may help you get out of a rut in your direct mail design, packaging and copywriting.
Just remember: Without relevency and getting the recipient to “stop and see what’s in it for me,” your awesome layout, packaging and copywriting might just be perfuming a pig.
Top 5 PPC Pitfalls
I just read a great article on Pay Per Click in the Multichannel Merchant about the top 5 things marketers get wrong in PPC campaigns… thought you would find this interesting – especially if you attended our Google AdWords Webinar. If you missed this Webinar, just view our on-demand library to get the basics on starting your own PPC campaign.
Check-out these 5 pitfalls to help you to…
- drive qualified prospects to your site
- improve click-through rates
- be more strategic about your bidding
- lower your costs-per-click
Triggered Communications Webinar & 5 Tips for Success
Filed under: Digital Lead Generation, Email Marketing, Marketing Technology Solutions, Uncategorized, integrated marketing
I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Triggered Communications is a great way to increase your email marketing’s timeliness, relevancy and ROI. To help get you started, we’re hosting a Webinar on April 15, 2010 at 1:00 – 2:00 p.m. EST — “How to Use Event Triggered Communications to Increase Email Relevancy, Response and Sales.”
We’ll show you how easy it is to set-up behaviorally triggered email messages that deliver the right message to the right subscriber at the exact moment he or she is most engaged and likely to respond using Listrak’s automated event triggered messaging solution.
You will learn how to:
- Add a powerful, automated email responder system to your integrated marketing mix
- Trigger specific email responses according to your customer’s behaviors or targeted events
- Have one-on-one conversations with each of your customers and prospects
- Increase your email’s relevancy, open rates and your sales
Participation in this webinar is free, but space is limited. So, reserve your seat today.
While we’re putting the finishing touches on our webinar, here are five tips from Target Marketing Magazine for Triggered Communications success.
- Thoughtfully defining your triggers – this is the heart of your program
- Prepare your sales team to handle these leads – without making customers feel like “they’re being stalked.” You want to your customer to be loyal to your brand and feel, “Hey, this company really gets me and understands my needs.” That’s a big difference from a creepy, “I’m-being-watched feeling!”
- Put contact frequency in your process so you don’t bug your best customer and burn-out your sales team
- Continually improve your triggered-based program using feedback from your best sales people
I’m excited about what Triggered Communications can do to grow our clients’ businesses and I’m looking forward to meeting you online on April 15 for the Webinar! I hope you can join us!
2010 DMA Should Be Interesting
Filed under: Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, General Marketing, Marketing Technology Solutions, Search Engine Marketing, Uncategorized, integrated marketing
2009 Direct Marketing Association's Annual Conference Oct. 17-21
I can’t remember a year where we have had as much change in our marketing world. With the economy struggling, this alone has had significant impact. Add onto this the evolution of new digital tools such as Search, Social Media and Mobile and this year’s Direct Marketing Association’s national convention is bound to be interesting.
Yet my initial day at the conference reinforces much of what I thought. While new tools and mediums evolve, much of the foundation for targeted marketing remains the same:
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Test, test, test: Continues to be the foundation for targeted media. With today’s powerful analytics, you can set up your testing strategies to optimize your marketing efforts whether it is your direct marketing acquisition effort, search or your web site.
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Permission-based: Permission-based marketing comes in the form of many names now (i.e. opt-in, preference centers, social media invitations), but a constant thread has been forming in marketing for over a decade. Today’s marketers realize that putting the consumer in the driver’s seat of their communications is the key in today’s world. Now there are just more targeted consumer options to opt-into than ever before.
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Technology Centric: Technology continues to drive our advances on many fronts. More user friendly tools to use without tapping the IT department. Increased abilities to personalize the medium to known customer attributes, easier and lower cost tools to manage all these efforts.
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Integration: A couple of decades ago, it was integrating targeted marketing with mass media to deliver improved performance. Today, these integration points are still important, but can be taken much further. Web site integration, retail point of sale, digital targeted media campaigns are now all thrown into the mix as well.
My point in all this is that while times are changing, likely 99.9+ percent of what we see at this year’s DMA will be based on the foundation already set. Should be an interesting time to see how the industry is doing and where the experts see it all going. From my first day in attendance, what is being touted as “new” looks very familiar.
Advantages of Creating an Integrated Marketing Database for Your Business
Filed under: Data Cleansing and Enhancement, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, General Marketing, Marketing Technology Solutions, Uncategorized
Integrated marketing is creating growing complications for most businesses to manage their customer data. Customer Email data management requirements for opt-outs and bounces are often difficult to maintain, and creating intelligent landing pages for customers to provide you with updated customer data adds yet another level of complexity.
In our opinion, one of the easiest ways for organizations to address these new complexities is to create a replicated marketing database driven from your enterprise customer data management tools. Rather than trying to make your enterprise tools something that they are typically not meant to be, creating a replicated marketing database provides the security and fully functioning marketing features for integrated electronic and traditional communications to your customer base.
While you may be concerned about costs, we find that this approach provides significant advantages:
- Typically costs much less than trying to customize your own enterprise system
- Can be launched much quicker and with less hassle than changes to your own system.
- Immediately offers more features (i.e. Landing pages for customer email and general updates, customer preference centers, activity reporting, demographically enhanced customer data) that would require even more costs and development time if done internally
Given the growing demands for integrated marketing communications, you are likely looking at this area if you haven’t already set a strategy for your organization. We recommend that you consider this approach when you do.
Feel free to give us a call to discuss options in this area, or listen to our recent webinar How Changing Communications Trends Drive Integrated Marketing ROI for more concrete Direct Marketing Association facts in this area. You will also find an overview of ICS’s Integrated Communications Platform (ICP) which may be consideration for your business as well.
Leveraging Legacy “In-Market Shopper” Data for Automotive
Filed under: Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Lead Management, List Strategy, analytics
It has been an interesting Summer in the Automotive Marketing space. Tough to be in Michigan and not be impacted by the challenges faced to jumpstart this business sector.
The focus of today’s message is using Legacy In Market Shopper data in the Automotive Space. Typically, Automobile Manufacturers use the freshest data coming from sources like CarsDirect and Autobytel when prospecting for automotive sales. This makes sense, as they are likely to still be shopping for a vehicle … and influencing the prospect to consider your brand is a proven email and direct marketing strategy.
Through the past few years, we have developed an enhanced legacy database for automotive prospecting. While this might not make sense to you at first, our experience with the data has proven it to be a source of significant power for automotive prospecting:
- First, In-Market Shopper data represents a massive pool of people that historically shop for new cars. As we know in this space from our years of registration data experience, historic new car shoppers are most likely still new car buyers. That factor by itself is powerful.
- Second, Brand History is a very important indicator of future buying preferences. If you have a history of considering Mazda (for example), you are very likely to consider the brand for future new car considerations.
- Finally, with Enhanced Data, we can utilize shopping history and clustering products such as Mosaic or Personicx to analyze and identify those top clusters of the brand competitive set of the product you are focusing on. A fairly straight forward approach that has proven to yield excellent results.
While legacy In-Market Shopping data by itself is considered weak, we can use our experience and data enhancement capabilities to turn this data into very productive contributors to your email and direct marketing initiative. While you can take my word for it, I encourage you to consider testing these approaches in your next email or direct marketing intiative.
Are you ready for “Cash for Clunkers”?
Filed under: Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, General Marketing, List Management, List Strategy, integrated marketing
According to the Detroit News on July 2, 2009, June auto sales show that consumers are holding-off on purchases until the Cash for Clunkers program gets started.
“Consumers encouraged by promising economic signs headed back to dealer showrooms last month, but sales sputtered in late June as prospective buyers waited for the government to introduce its cash-for-clunkers incentives.”
This was a timely article for me as we were just putting the finishing touches on ICS AutoNet’s new data card for our “Cash for Clunkers” prospect list.
Obviously, it’s in the best interest of these consumers who qualify for this program to wait for the “clunker cash.” As soon as this program starts, they’ll be ready to purchase.
So, hopefully auto marketers and dealers realize that the time to connect with these consumers is right now.
Through ICS AutoNet’s self-reported data, our “Cash for Clunkers” list allows dealers access to auto ownership and leasing information that State DMVs can no longer provide. Plus, we specifically designed this file to target consumers who may qualify for the government program. We can connect dealers to owners of vehicles with targeted makes, models and vehicle years from 2002 and earlier within a specified radius of the dealership.
Our list is derived from a comprehensive master file compiled from multiple Shelby-compliant sources and offers more than 100 million records. Each month, a million fresh records are added to the data file – making it an effective marketing tool for one-time promotions or ongoing campaigns.
ICS AutoNet’s Self-reported data file has been successfully applied in automotive marketing, consumer marketing and service-related programs. Following is an overview of available selects:
- Make and Model
- Vehicle Year 2002 and before
- Odometer
- Postal and telephone; Email available upon request.
- Owner demographics and lifestyle (age, income and geography)
List pricing starts at $115 / M. Please note that we include make, model, vehicle year and geography at no extra charge. A complete data card is available for more information.
Offline and Online integration — Little things make a big difference!
Filed under: Direct Marketing, General Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, integrated marketing
This week, I came across an article from JupiterResearch talking about online and offline integration efforts that I thought was pretty strong. We have been talking about marketing integration for nearly two decades … but now we have more channels to integrate than ever before.
Possibly you have heard the statistic: “An iProspect’s 2007 study ‘Offline influence on Online Search Behavior Study’ found that 67% of online users were driven to perform a search as a result of an offline marketing message … And 39% of those offline-influenced searchers ultimately made a purchase.
These statistics make a lot of sense to me, but the sad point of the article was that nearly half (45%) of search engine marketers still do not integrate their online and offline efforts. All kinds of reasons came up as to why. The top reasons were:
- They don’t advertise in offline channels
- Lack the budget
- Lack the resources
- Don’t know better
- Have separate people managing offline efforts … and they are not synchronized with online
- Just don’t see the benefit of integration
In my opinion, a big part of the issue is that while online marketers understand their medium, they really don’t understand the overall disciplines that drive marketing and consumer behavior. With the online mediums growing so quickly, many have jumped in without fully understanding how to optimize the overall marketing dollars spent.
It not necessarily big things that involve huge investments. Look at some of these stats:
- 76% of offline offers could not be acted upon online
- 74% of offline keywords were not used online
- 66% did not use the same images and videos offline as online
- 60% did not include their company slogan / tagline or even their product or service name prominently online
I am sure the economic challenges of 2009 will force some reevaluation in this area. From my perspective, this is some pretty basic “marketing blocking and tackling”. While I am happy that we are addressing these key issues with our clients, more education and awareness is needed to connect the best practice results and disciplines with the average company’s marketing efforts.
Where do you go to find information on a business?
Filed under: General Marketing, Search Engine Marketing
We have had some discussion around the office recently on where people go today when they want to find a particular business or business product? It use to be that our only option was to pull out the “Yellow Pages”. Obviously today, the Internet has changed our world in this area … but, how many people are really using the Internet instead of the Yellow Pages?
Well, my informal poll is really inconclusive. Some still use Yellow Pages, some exclusively use the Internet and some use a mix of both depending on what their need is. I searched the Internet for some more statistical backing in this area. The reports I found were a little dated and one can only believe that today’s stats would point to an even greater share of consumers using the Internet:
- –In June 2007, comScore Networks reported that 60% of local consumers now go online to search for local businesses, as opposed to 33% that go first to the printed Yellow Pages.
- –Almost 40% of local shoppers say that a presence on the Internet – or lack of presence – will affect their decision about who they do business with. [Source: Web.com, 2007]
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Nearly 137 billion searches were conducted at the five U.S. core search engines in 2008, representing an increase of
21 % versus the previous year. [Source: comScore Networks, 2009] - Search query growth was driven largely by an increase in searches per searcher, which rose 16% from the previous year, while number of unique searchers grew 6% . [Source: comScore Networks, 2009]
- Google Sites, which generated nearly 85 billion searches in 2008, accounted for nearly 90 percent of the total growth in
search query volume during the year. [Source: comScore Networks, 2009]
Clearly, every business needs to think through how they establish their electronic presence … as it is an increasing part of every company’s marketing efforts.
Build your email mix with sweepstakes!
Filed under: Data Cleansing and Enhancement, Email Marketing, General Marketing, Sweepstakes and Contests
I was visiting with a client the other day who was doing an excellent job of acquiring their customers’ email addresses. They are very experienced marketers who focus the majority of their marketing efforts on cross-sell activities.
They were leveraging enticing promotional sweepstakes as a way to drive email activation from customers who had not previously provided email addresses. Clearly, they understand the communications savings of the email channel and current customer marketing trends in this area. Take a look below, according to a recent industry channel preference white paper, over 70% of consumers would prefer the email channel for communications from companies they have granted permission to send ongoing communications:
Customer preferences are continuing to evolve … becoming more understanding when email communications is the most effective for their lives. Clearly, marketers understand the cost efficiencies and speed of the communications.
For marketers, the use of a well designed sweepstakes can be a great way to increase your customer email coverage … ultimately allowing you to lower your customer communications costs and speed to market.
