davidpoulos.com

Category: Data

  • Old-School Marketing Can Still Be Effective – If the Math Is Right . . .

    Old-School Marketing Can Still Be Effective – If the Math Is Right . . .

    I just received a living anachronism in my mailbox today – a local vendor card deck.

    This format used to be much more popular, and was often used for B-to-B lead generation 20-40 years ago. If you’re younger and aren’t familiar with these, they are a package of roughly 3″x5″ lightweight cards, printed front and back, packaged up in shrink wrap like a candy bar, with one card acting as the “host” or sponsor and carrying the address block. Each card is a two-sided ad for a different local business, often themed around a group of industries or services pitched to a specific target group. For instance, if I were a deck publisher, and I was creating a deck to send to a list of recently changed addresses, I would likely target new movers by including paid ad cards from a roofer, a cleaning service, a painting company, a landscaper, paving contractor, pool company, lawn service, gutter sales and cleaning, chimney sweeps and other services that people moving into a new home or a new neighborhood might need.

    This one appeared to be pitched not to new movers, but homeowners in general, as it is addressed to me or “Current Occupant” and contained cards from a fence contractor, a counter top company, a landscaper, a pool company, and several others surrounding home ownership and renovation.

    I picked out maybe three vendors that were relevant to my life and my needs, and pitched the rest. The Host card offered a packaged up bundle of prizes by combining offers from three of the vendors, including a restaurant, a pool builder and an interior design firm. The offer isn’t very explicit, but the slug line offers FREE dinner for two, and drives you to a website that will inevitably explain how these three go together to help me win a free dinner for two at the restaurant.

    This format has lost popularity over the years, but at one time was quite lucrative. I know of direct mail publishers who churned out an industry-specific B-to-B deck every quarter, and went on vacation for two months until the next one needed to be put together. Once the ads are sold on a long-term one- or two-year contract, it’s just assemble, print, package, mail. Pretty simple, but the list maintenance was pretty high, in order to keep response levels up and advertisers happy and coming back, and the level of detail to get a larger deck produced correctly is pretty high – it’s like printing a magazine with no editorial and no binding.

    With the advent of local look-up directories on the Internet, such decks as the one in my hand are anachronistic at best, but they must pull and make economic sense to the advertiser, or they wouldn’t exist. Kudos to the publisher for making the math work for them and for keeping this format alive.

    If you’ve seen something in your mailbox that was unexpected, let us know, we’d love to hear about it . . .

    Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

  • E-Mail Makes A Comeback!

    E-Mail Makes A Comeback!

    There was a time, not too long ago, where marketing pundits and other “experts” were saying that E-mail had run it’s course as a marketing media vehicle, that it was stale, that it’s open rate was too low, that the spam filters and firewalls had made it nearly impossible to get good results with e-mail marketing.

    Now those same pundits (of whom I was not one) are having to eat their words as major marketers are singing the praises of a well-crafted, simple e-mail to your hottest, most worked on lists. As usual, it’s the message, not the medium that counts, and a well-crafted effective anything will always beat the schlocky, hacky, abusive e-mail campaigns that desensitized audiences and killed response rates based on misuse and abuse of the medium and therefore the audience.

    As always, it comes down to personal approaches, real, workmanlike copy, free of typos, grammatical redundancy, slang and other silliness that kill credibility. E-mail is still mail, and it’s still sent to a single address, which means there’s a person on the other end. Simply write with that person in mind, on a one-to-one basis, and suddenly watch open rates soar, response rates double or triple, and sales shoot skyward.

    Never mind all the gimmicks, bells and whistles. I know of one marketer that sends out plain text stuff that nets him phenomenal response rates – not a photo to be seen, not even a logo, just good effective copy, real headlines that resonate with the audience – his secret? He writes to his Grandmother in his mind – if the offer is clear enough for her to understand, if the copy clean enough that she won’t cringe (Grandma was a Jr. High English teacher), if the intent clear enough and the benefits plain enough for her to like it, he’s got a winner. Yes, he primarily markets to an older audience – but these days unless you work for Disney, who doesn’t? Not a bad acid test – can your latest missive pass it?

    Keep it simple and keep it direct – speak to a specific person – if you personalize, be sure to get their name and gender correct, otherwise don’t bother. Nothing will kill response quicker than the feeling that you didn’t even care enough to send the right message – it’s like reading someone else’s mail, and it creeps people out.

    Keep the file small, keep the message simple – huge files still give viewers trouble, big images still get caught in spam filters and firewall screeners. The trend in design these days is to make the whole e-mail an image or series of images – and my browser is set to make me actually request these image files in order to view them – why make me work to see your information? It would have to be a heck of a headline to make me click three more times and wait for them to load, when I can simply hit “delete”.

    A well-researched list is still the key to success with E-mail. Most rented lists under perform, as e-mail addresses change more frequently than physical addresses. A self-selected list is best – based on a web login, or a previous response, or an inquiry, something you can verify and be sure is “opt-in” work very well – permission marketing is still king!

    Frequency is something you can debate all day, but suffice to say if you irritate your audience, your response will drop, and often less is more. I’d rather hear from you 4 times a year with relevant info than 8 or 12 times with fluff and nonsense. Save it for the good stuff, if you’re going to go to all the trouble to put together the mechanics of an e-mail, it might as well be a good one . . .

    Send me a copy of the worst e-mail you’ve received recently, and I’ll send it back to you with an analysis – FREE.

    If you found this useful and valuable, share it with your colleagues, and be sure and let me know by subscribing to this blog, above. Also, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

  • Getting It Right Actually Costs LESS!

    Getting It Right Actually Costs LESS!

    Marketing activities are increasingly driven by data of various types – the power provided by social media platforms comes largely from the data that ‘likes’ clicks, links and other transactional activity generates for marketers. But there are many other tidbits of data that could be draining your marketing wallet without you even knowing it, and the answer to stopping the leak is simply to be diligent about your data hygiene. The Data Warehousing Institute estimates contact data quality problems cost U.S. businesses over $600 billion annually*. That’s a lot of loss for not maintaining an accurate database or renting cheap lists.

    Your in-house customer data, or your prospect or outreach marketing data is a literal gold mine, but if the ore you start with is low quality and dirty, the yield will certainly suffer. It ends up costing you far less to rent, purchase or compile clean, actionable data than it does to buy cheap low-quality data and have it ‘cleaned’ after the fact. And, there’s a further downside to using bad data – you can damage your brand and erode the opportunity for future sales with that customer over time.

    If an organization purchases 300,000 contacts a month for direct marketing or outbound telemarketing, and each contact costs $0.05, it will spend $15,000 a month. But the real costs don’t stop there. Instead, the costs of working that data lead – the sales and marketing time to create a complete, accurate and current record – must be factored in as well. Ultimately, converting bad data to usable, quality data can result in an organization not paying $0.05 per contact, but rather investing $5.62 dollars per bad contact to make it usable.**

    Additionally, if you extend that example, not only are you spending $5.62 per bad record, you’re also wasting over a dollar a piece on them just in production cost, at $.75 for the mailing and $.32 postage to mail it. if your list is 10% ‘undeliverable’ that amounts to 30,000 x $6.69 = $200,700 wasted just on pieces that never got there. Add in creative costs, and you may as well have flushed a quarter million dollars down the john! Mail four times that year using that list and it’s over a million dollars in waste, and I don’t know too many organizations who have the resources to waste a million a year in marketing costs they KNOW go nowhere.

    Clean data cuts cost per sale, increases sales per mailing, and boosts your marketing efficiency to a significant degree. Think your data is clean? Try this exercise: ask your data warehouse to cut you a slice of customer data from a year ago, 10,000 records selected at random from last year, de-duplicated to yield 10,000 unique records. Now, put those in a spreadsheet and just visually scan the data. See how many empty cells there are, how many e-mail addresses don’t fit the proper mailable format or work as actual links, see how many zip codes are either incomplete or inaccurate after a zip sort, compared to the state they link to, check how many phone numbers are either incomplete or formatted improperly. Take ten at random and call them, see if they go to the person it appears they do. Now, count each error from the above checks. Multiply your count by the total size of your database in 10,000 increments, and you’ll have an idea of the percentage of your total database that contains inaccurate or corrupt records, and are wasting you money.

    Clean, fresh data is efficient, productive data, that makes you money and is an asset. Inaccurate, dirty, corrupt data is a silent money drain that can leach the effectiveness out of your marketing programs like a cancer. Here’s to getting your data squeaky clean!

    *Eckerson, Wayne. “Who Ensures Clean Data?” The Data Warehousing Institute. September 2009. Web. January 2011.
    .
    ** From “Cast a Smaller Net: Simplifying Lead Generation” by Jason Butler Copyright 2011 Goldleaf Data Corporation.