Marketing BEEP

Direct Marketing’s Future in Customers’ Hands, says DMA

"We are all direct marketers now, whether we know it or not," states Michelle Tiletnick, research manager of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) to conclude the executive summary of the DMA's new 78-page qualitative report, “Future of Direct Marketing.”

The DMA’s first ever “Future” report details trends in direct marketing for the next 5 and 10 years, as well as how it will get there. The report contains insights from 35 direct marketing leaders, such as Herschell Gordon Lewis of Lewis Enterprises; Alan Moss of Google; Jeanniey Mullen of Zinio; and Akira Oka of Direct Marketing Japan Inc.

The experts were asked specific questions with the most interesting being: “Where do you think direct marketing will be in five and ten years?”

• Customers will be in control. If you don’t give them what they want, one of your competitors will.

• Measurable and accountable marketing will increase because with the economy, companies can’t afford to use marketing strategies that may not work.

• Traditional direct marketing (mail, catalogs) will decrease while digital marketing rises.

• Marketers will increase the use of multiple channels--but will communicate a single message.

And how will marketers prepare for all of these changes?

• Invest in the future (use technology to capitalize on data digital channels offer)

• Ask customers for their media preferences

• Test everything

• Be open-minded

The experts also weighed in on 19 industry categories, including:

• Social media: “As social and mobile channels develop, the metrics and analytics available will become more useful to brand and merchandising managers alike. Rather than simple volumetric measurements (how many people saw our YouTube ‘viral’ video, or ‘friended’ us on Facebook?), you can anticipate learning about how influence spreads through a network, and across channels,” states analytics expert “Wandering” Dave Rhee.

• Email: Jordan Cohen, senior director, industry relations for Goodmail Systems, predicts the reinvention of email as a an app that is “able to support all the functionality of a website [streaming video, rich media graphics, one-click shopping, one-click bill pay and more] with the added bonus of being able to push the content to an audience of opt-in recipients.”

• Print Catalog/retail: “Traditional retailers will become more direct, and direct merchants will look to stores as a means of competing with larger rivals and growing their brands,” according to Neil O'Keefe, the DMA's vice president for the catalog and multichannel segment.

• Interactive Marketing: According to Alan Moss, Google’s director of online sales and operations, “the current state of the economy may accelerate movement down the path that direct marketing has already begun traveling over the past few years--the path towards increased measurability.”

• Media/publishing: In 2009, Mobile Marketer Editor Mickey Alam Khan expects “resources will be moved to the Internet and even mobile, although those two channels will not be able to pay the bills for most media companies, especially with the way they are set up today.”

(Report quotes courtesy Les Luchter, MediaPost’s Marketing Daily.)

Marketing Org Charts: Not Just for People Anymore!

Many small business owners and managers have a problem visualizing their marketing plan. They know their marketing efforts need to be organized, but they just aren’t sure how to do it. Many business owners do know how to create an organizational chart though, and there’s nothing that says you can’t make an org chart for your marketing efforts. Org charts aren’t just for organizing people anymore.

 

It can be helpful to see who’s doing what in your marketing department and even if you leave out the “whom,” it can still be helpful to see what marketing efforts have yet to be covered. You might even see where you or your marketing team is lacking in expertise and find you need to hire a consultant to work only on your direct mail program or a part-time associate to take over the Web site.

 

How to Create the Marketing Org Chart

How you organize your org chart is completely up to you and your needs, but I’ll provide you with a sample. I’d start at the top level with “Marketing” and work your way down, based on how you can split your marketing efforts. Perhaps you have a “Lead Generation” component that requires its own efforts, such as “advertising” and “referrals.” You could also include a “Marketing Materials” heading, which lists all the materials you need to create for your marketing plan, including a Web site, brochures, flyers, posters, billboards, etc.

 

Marketing

Lead Generation

Marketing Materials

Customer Service

Phone Greeting

Brochures

Posters

Referrals

Advertising

Community Efforts

You can add as many subcategories as you need, and later fill in the boxes with more details, such as dates that brochures need to be printed or mailed; details on the type of referral program you want to incorporate; and you could even write in your phone greeting that will maximize customer service. Basically, your marketing org chart just outlines what you need to do and you can organize your marketing efforts in order of importance from the top to the bottom. Here are some suggestions for what to include:

 

Strategic Marketing

Market research

Partnerships

Business development

Channel marketing

 

Online Marketing

Web site

Blogs

Forums

Social media

Web traffic development

 

Product Marketing

Product planning

Product management

Product pricing

Product packaging

Product launch

 

Again, these are only suggestions – you can include whatever categories you need. There’s no right or wrong way to create a marketing org chart, as long as it gives you a clear picture of your marketing efforts. 

Interactive Print Marketing

Television and face-to-face marketing presentations work much better than a brochure or poster. Why? Because they’re interactive. They engage people’s attention much easier than a piece of paper can. Interaction generates interest, but it also generates memory. People remember facts easier when they can associate the facts with an event or interaction.

Pop-up mailing items work especially well to engage people to find out more about your product. A UK company, Pop-Up Mailers (maybe they got so creative with their products there wasn’t enough creativity left for their name? Or, of course, they didn’t want to confuse anyone.) creates everything from cubes with marketing info printed on them to dissolving pictures. I’d like to share with you a few of their most ingenious products that you aren’t likely to see here in the United States, which is precisely why you should use them in your marketing materials. I would suggest scoping out printing companies here in the States first, though, to keep our money here while we’re in this slow economy.

Dissolving pictures – looks like a folded brochure, but you pull on a tab at the bottom and the picture changes, or dissolves into another picture. The “picture” can actually be text, or whatever you want to display, but it’s probably best to start out with an eye -catching picture and then when the reader pulls the tab you can give them your marketing message. You can use this to launch a new product, announce a grand opening or to announce a sale. The Web site has videos of how it works: http://www.popupmailers.co.uk/popup_dissolvingpicture.html.

Jumpinjax – this is nothing like I’ve ever seen before. This would especially work with kids. It’s a pop-up box that has a tray that slides out, and on that tray are 4 pop-up cubes that jump out of the tray. You need to see the video to really appreciate it:
http://www.popupmailers.co.uk/popup_jumpinjax.html. The tray can hold some promotional postcard-size info cards and the pop-up boxes can also hold your marketing message.

Fortune Teller – this one’s probably more for the girls than the guys, but I bet the guys will remember these playground, homemade toys! Remember the folded piece of paper that girls used to write fortunes on? You’d pick a color, and then spell out the color while moving the folded paper in and out while it rested on your fingers. Then you’d pick a number and count out the number. Then whatever flap of paper your number landed on was your fortune! Ah, the good ol’ days. Check them out here: http://www.popupmailers.co.uk/popup_fortuneteller.html. Whoever thought something on the playground could be turned into marketing material?

Pop-Up Mailers has a lot of other interesting pop-ups you should check out. Once you get ideas from their Web site, I’d look around at other online printing companies to see what you can order in the States. By the way, Pop-Up Mailers doesn’t have prices on their Web site; you have to ask for a quote. They do say that you have to order a minimum of 250 that each is less than the price of a birthday card, to give you a ballpark figure.

5 Reasons to Choose an Advertising Agency Focused on Online Advertising

As the Internet has grown, so has online advertising. There are advertising agencies that now do only online advertising. Many of these are spin-offs of traditional advertising agencies that realized that their online advertising departments were growing bigger and bigger.  

Online advertising has a different set of rules than traditional advertising, so advertising professionals have specialized. That’s how we got to the point of having traditional advertising companies and “online advertising companies” (I’m using this term to define brick-and-mortar agencies that focus on online advertising, not agencies that only exist online). Maybe you’re thinking that an online advertising agency isn’t really needed, that a traditional advertising agency can do everything from online to brochures to billboards. That might be true, but unless the traditional advertising agency has a dedicated department that focuses just on online advertising, you’ll be missing out on many benefits: 

1. Online experience. Advertising agencies that focus online have more experience and more exposure to the online advertising world. These people work in this venue every day. Many of these advertising professionals bring other backgrounds into their positions, which enhances their ability to take what was traditionally offline (like TV) and put it online in a format that works.  

2. More effective online ads. Oftentimes, these online agencies can create a more effective online ad simply because they’ve done more research online and are used to the online atmosphere. Online advertising agencies know what works online and how to get the Internet user’s attention. Online agencies know what colors work best on computer screens, and how to get an ad to look good on a computer as well as a BlackBerry.  

3. They know the right approach to take. An online agency knows where to advertise on the Internet that perhaps traditional agencies don’t know about yet. Online agencies have the inside scoop on up-and-coming Web sites to advertise on because they have connections.  

4. An extensive network or online connections. These agencies often work with both Web sites that need advertisers and businesses that want to advertise online. Marrying these needs is easier for an online agency because it already has the resources, the contacts.  

5. An online agency can do all your online advertising needs for you, including email. If you need a generated response email, an online agency can do that. If you need an interactive flyer or newsletter on your Web site, an online agency can do that. Online agencies employ many more Web designers and online specialists than traditional agencies. You can tap into a lot more technology-minded brains at an exclusively online-focused agency.

Direct Mail Lives!

There have been a lot of blog posts and articles circulating online about the “death of print marketing” or the “death of direct mail.” It seems to me to just be a bunch of hype.

Look at some numbers gathered by the clearinghouse of research on print media effectiveness, Print in the Mix (www.printinthemix.com):

• More than 60 percent of merchants say catalogs are their primary sales channel. Web sites come in at a distant second place, with only 20 percent of merchants using the Web as their primary sales channel. These numbers were gathered from the Direct Marketing Association’s State of the Catalog Industry study conducted in 2008.

• From 2003 to the present, there’s been a “large increase in circulation” of catalogs. The Direct Marketing Association states that this is probably a result of companies using catalogs to drive business to their Web sites.

• The study also found that the “paper catalog is still the largest revenue generator among all channels” of marketing. Web sales are growing, but so far haven’t touched the nearly 50 percent of sales generated by catalogs in 2007 and 2008.

Direct mail is the third most popular type of ads used to reach specific segments. Online marketing and search marketing were used more often, according to a survey by Complete (www.complete.com).

When it comes to coupons, an August 2008 study conducted by Prospectiv (www.prospectiv.com) found that “newspapers and magazines are the primary source of coupons for 51 percent of consumers.” This makes print material the top source for coupons. The same study found that nearly 40 percent of consumers polled “want to receive their future coupons via direct mail.” Only 26 percent want to receive coupons through email and 16 percent favor getting coupons from Web sites.

ExactTarget’s 2008 Channel Preference Survey found that almost 66 percent of those surveyed have made a purchased based on a marketing message received by email. More than 75 percent said they have made a purchase in response to direct mail.

All of these stats show that direct mail is still very much alive and kicking. People don’t like to get junk mail, it’s true. But they do like to receive offers that they find interesting through the mail. I think the key to doing direct mail marketing correctly is to focus your message on your target audience. Then, people don’t mind getting your direct mail and they actually use your message to make a purchase. As long as you have a targeted mailing list, it seems you’ll do better with direct mail than you will with online advertising.

How to Get Direct Mail into the CEO’s Hands

In B2B marketing, who is the decision-maker? Who do you want to see your marketing materials? It’s the top management, of course. They are the ones that have the power to write you a check and order 1,000 of your products.

Of course, top management people are busy. They’ve got packed schedules with meetings and out-of-town travel. To get something on their desk, you need to get past their assistants, along with the mailroom attendants that sort and screen incoming mail. Here are some tips on how to design and deliver direct mail to upper management for B2B sales.

Personalize your mail. Send a personalized letter “written” by your CEO to another CEO or top manager at the company whose business you’re courting. Type the letter on the CEO’s personal corporate stationary and have him actually sign it. Try not to use a signature stamp if you can help it.

You can write the basics of the letter – the selling points – and then have the CEO fill in some details that only CEO-type people would know. The CEO can talk about how good it was to see the other CEO at a recent fundraiser or party or talk about business challenges both companies are facing that only a CEO would understand.

Of course, many CEOs don’t or won’t take the time to do all of this. But a letter ghostwritten by you in your CEO’s place about the benefits of working with the other company and how you can specifically address the other company’s needs also works well. This time, you can use that signature stamp, if needed.

Use dimensional mailers. According to the Direct Marketing Association 2005 Response Rate Report, dimensional mail came in second to telemarketing (5.28% vs. 5.53%) in the lead-generation category. A dimensional mailer is anything that is uniquely packaged so that it has some dimension beyond the usual flat envelope. It could be a box, a cylinder or oftentimes, it’s something of interest inside a box. A box is usually good enough to get past the mailroom because boxes hold goodies inside.

Send a sample of your product inside the mailer, or better yet, send something that relates to your marketing theme. And remember, you’re sending this package straight to the top dog, so include something good (that might equal expensive, but it will be worth it). One example is a company that sent a CEO a box with a silk napkin embroidered with the receiving company’s logo, a silverware set and a menu that was comprised of the sending company’s services. The offer was that the sending company’s sales rep would bring a catered lunch to a scheduled appointment if the CEO would hear her out.

Don’t use teasers on the front of your envelope or postcard. Teasers that work with consumers, like “Free” and “Urgent” won’t fly when it comes to corporate mail. The mailroom attendants will throw those away without a second glance. Use classy envelopes and full color postcards that have a simple, elegant design that the mailroom attendant would think the CEO wouldn’t mind seeing. Use plain envelopes but colorful postcards. A black-and-white postcard only works if it gives off the feel of your brand. In most cases, though, a full color postcard will catch the CEO’s attention more so than one that looks like newspaper print.

Use overnight mail. If you can afford it, overnight it. When the package says FedEx or DHL on it, it usually gets opened right away. There’s obviously something important in there if the sender spent the money to get the package there overnight.

After doing all this, you’ve got a good chance of getting your mail in the hands of the decision-maker. Now what? Make sure your offer is out-of-this-world and is something the top manager wants and needs for his company. Offer him something he can’t get anywhere else, like a special report or a special product that none of his competitors have. Don’t waste your money getting your mail in the CEO’s hands if you can’t give him a great offer.