December, 2009
Getting a Big Response on a Small Budget
In a webinar Small Budget but BIG Response, presented by Inside Direct Mail, two premier direct
marketers, Gary Hennerberg, president of the Hennerberg Group, and Grant
Johnson, CEO of Johnson Direct, offered a few tips on how to do just that:
Develop Marketing and Testing Plans
- Set marketing objectives to
measure against.
- Identify key messages based
upon segmentation.
- Test offers with messaging, but
test offers and messaging separately, where possible.
- Make budgetary decisions, and
test all you can.
Understand Your Customers
- Analyze your database.
- Understand the impact of the
Pareto Principle (80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of
your customers); for example, one marketer found that 69 percent of its
mail volume delivered 94 percent of its sales with smart ZIP code
targeting.
- Contact the top customer groups.
- Use a very special offer.
- You can use an inexpensive
package to customers.
Dig In to the Mailing Lists
- Spend twice as much time on
list research and testing than you do on creative.
- Run "what if?"
scenarios.
- Look for
"unharvested" prospects, i.e., those people who tend to get
overlooked in traditional market research scenarios.
Play the Elimination Game
Eliminate a component.
- Eliminate a color.
- Talk to production about
reconfiguring a package.
- Do you need all the
personalization?
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Avoiding E-Mail Mistakes
· Batch and Blast
Use event-triggered messaging
to build automated e-mail conversations or dynamic content to ensure the
messaging is relevant and of interest to recipients.
· Not Sending a Welcome Message
Sending a welcome message immediately after recipients opt in has two major
benefits. It validates subscribers' e-mail addresses,in case false addresses were given-hard bounces
negatively affect your reputation. It reaches subscribers when
they're most engaged with your brand; it's a missed opportunity if you
don't send one.
· Sending Separate E-mails Instead of a Campaign
Don't thinking of email as a cheap way of blasting out whatever new message
comes to mind, Plan strategic email campaigns that work together
to deliver the right offers at the right times.
· Putting Important Messaging and Calls
to Action Below the Fold
Design your e-mails so the most important messages and your calls to action are
visible and prominent without scrolling, otherwise, they risk going unseen.
· Sending People to the Wrong Landing
Page
Consumers look to e-mail for its ease of use, and they expect you to make the
offers in your e-mail efforts easy to find once they click through to your
site. That means sending them to the right landing page, because if consumers
have to work to find your offer, chances are they'll simply click elsewhere.
· Not Including Social Links
A great benefit of e-mail is that it easily can be shared with others. Adding
"Share with Your Network" links for social media sites gives recipients the chance
to pass along your messages, thus reaching a wider audience.
· Treating E-mail as a Separate Channel
E-mail should be part of an integrated marketing strategy that works in concert
with social media, direct marketing, Web site, search and all your other
channels. Use a consistent strategy and messaging across every touchpoint,
e-mail included.
Excerpted from Target Marketing
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