What’s Your Marketing ROI?

Your generic brochure, direct mail piece, e-newsletter or magazine ad campaign doesn’t work as well today. People are being bombarded with offers and choices. Campaigns will struggle to get a 2% response. For mass market newsprint, magazine, street, TV or radio ads it’s well under 0.1% being one per thousand.

Translated for the small business with a small client base, a 0.1% response is just a few sales. Mass market advertising clearly works best for major retailers with thousands of potential customers. Yet small businesses are convinced by old-school agencies to advertise this same way not for sales, but for ‘branding’…

Yes, good copywriting, design and a superb offer can make a huge difference. But a direct mailer response rate of 2-3%, being 5-10x better than mass advertising, is still hard work. And typically of those that initially ‘respond’ to the offer, under 25% will buy your product or service.

To see what all this means to your sales & bottom line, checkout these ROI Calculators – It’s scary. This is why most business owners and marketers constantly shop around to get the cheapest possible design, printing and mailing rates. They know that getting a good ROI is always going to be hard work and aggressive cost cutting seems the only option available.

All this occurs because most online as well as traditional advertising and mailing campaigns treat everyone the same. It’s been referred to as the ’spray and pray’ advertising method. These campaigns are truly relevant only to a few…

The real secret to high response, super-efficient marketing lies in working your customer database.

Traditional advertising is often a wasteful, inefficient process. Studies tell us that 93% of your sales will come from just 40% of your mailings (click graph). So, why waste time and money continuing to send stuff to that huge 60% chunk of people on your address list who don’t buy? Potentially, a good database can tell you:

• WHO you should communicate with,

• HOW you should communicate,

• WHEN you should communicate,

• And with WHAT offer

How? Data mining – This helps you find a subset of your customers that are most likely to react/respond to your marketing campaigns.  By targeting ONLY those most likely to respond, you’ll achieve about the same response, for a lower cost.

Then if you want to boost sales results, start introducing more and more relevancy into your messages. Yes, it does increase the per-piece cost, but you’ll find that by sending out fewer pieces (i.e. 60% less), together with inherently higher response rates, will more than cover everything, giving stunning sales and ROIs.

So, Let’s Build a Marketing Database

The big problem with data and databases is that they’re inevitably in a mess. Companies today are lucky to have one that has accurate names and postal addresses, let alone other specific details like

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Double Your Rewards

Nearly everybody is in one or more loyalty programmes these days, basically to get those discounts, rewards or airpoints.

These reward programmes have to be done right. In an excellent article by Geoffrey De Weaver "… consumers do not mind sharing information with retailers as long as they receive worthwhile, personalised benefits…  54% of Australian consumers have at least one reward or loyalty card, and 69% tried to use a loyalty card as often as possible. Importantly, both figures are trending north…  Never lose sight of the top 20% of your customers who generate the majority of your sales and profits…"

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