FIRST, it must produce a sale.

DUH, right? Every promotion is designed to make sales. But when you’re talking about promotions for your customer list be it a cellphone number or email, they do more:

The number of promotions you send to your customers — and, equally important, the quality of the copy in those promotions — increases the number of times each customer will order from you this year.

So how many times should you contact existing customers?

Great question!

Well, back in the bad old days before the Web, nearly all of our contacts were through the mail. My theory was, “Out of sight, out of mind” — so I made sure my customers had something from me in their mailboxes every blessed week.

First, we mailed to them only on the first of each month. When we added a mailing on the 15th, response and average sale notched higher and cancellations dropped.

When we added a third mailing — more improvement in ROI and longevity. Finally, we went to a weekly mailing schedule and, once again, all our numbers improved.

Put simply, by quadrupling the number of times each customer heard from us, we more than quadrupled our orders and revenues — AND, miraculously, our cancellation rates declined.

Why? I’ll get to that next. First, I should mention that we had a high average sale and good margins, so we could afford to spend a fortune on printing and postage in those days. Back then it was expensive to, up to $1 per recipient by the time we accounted for the catalogue, stamps and effort. And even today, if you’re selling high value items to selected, high value customers, $1 per recipient can still be a real bargain.

Direct mail still works well. In fact in many markets it’s the best option. But today with e-mail that costs a few cents and texts not much more, there’s simply no excuse not to talk to your customers every week. Done well, the payback can be incredible with one text campaign giving the business a 1,650% ROI (read here), although a ‘modest’ 200-500% ROI is more typical of text campaigns.

The SECOND objective of every contact you have with your existing customers:

• It must make them feel closer to you…
• intensify their loyalty to you…
• and make them eager to hear from you again.

We call it “bonding”. Many of you that already belong to a club or subscription product/service have a strong loyalty to that brand, fashion shop, food establishment or a winery. This is what marketing is all about. Showing love back to the customer by keeping them informed with information or offers they care about…..

Wall Street Journal, 12 January 2010

Looking to cut costs amid the recession, Alicia Settle initially thought it would be a good idea to eliminate her company’s annual direct mailing.

But after swapping snail mail for email, saw a 25% drop in orders.

Spending about $20,000 on the personally signed letters, which offered customers a discount on early orders, seemed indulgent for Per Annum Inc., which sells city diaries, albums, and planners in the struggling corporate gift market. But after swapping snail mail for email last year, Ms. Settle saw a 25% drop in early orders compared with the same period the previous year.

"We realized we had made a huge mistake," says Ms. Settle, president of the New York firm.

The affordability of e-marketing, along with the explosion of social media and the desire to trim costs in the recession, has prompted many small companies like Per Annum to slash traditional direct-mail budgets. U.S. consumers received about 5.2 billion pieces of direct mail in the third quarter of 2009, a 27% decline compared with 7.1 billion in the same period a year earlier, according to Mintel Comperemedia, a research firm that tracks direct-mail marketing.

However, some entrepreneurs who were quick to write off direct mail as too pricey or passé are finding it’s not so easy to dismiss.

Ms. Settle says that at first she blamed the economy for the dropoff, until she "started hearing from customers that they never got their ‘reminder’ in the mail." Ms. Settle quickly sent a postcard mailing in June, which recouped the 25% loss, she says.

Costs are still taken into account. Many entrepreneurs find that the boiler-plate methods of the past—such as purchasing mailing lists and sending fliers or coupons to a mass audience—often aren’t cost-effective. Instead, business owners are creating personalized mailings, which may include special offers or other valuable information, and sending them to a hand-picked list of current and prospective customers.

The idea is to send something that’s more appealing than "junk" mail and more noticeable than an email message

The idea is to send something that’s more appealing than "junk" mail and potentially more noticeable than an email message, says Eric Anderson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. That allows business owners "to offer a personal touch the larger firms may not be able to have," he says.

To save money, Peter Taffae, founder of ExecutivePerils, a Los Angeles wholesale insurance broker, stopped his small firm’s humorous postcard mailings last year. The colorful marketing pieces showcase the insurance broker’s offerings through satirical movie themes, such as "Full Metal Policy," a parody of "Full Metal Jacket" and "Singin’ in the Renewal," from the classic film "Singin’ in the Rain." About 2,000 current and potential clients received the postcards, which cost the company $4,000 to send out every four to six weeks.

Customers complained when ExecutivePerils dropped its humorous postcards.

"We would visit some clients and notice they were hanging the postcards on the wall, collecting them," says Mr. Taffae, who says he secured $270,000 from a new client who chose to do business with the firm in late 2008 after receiving the postcards.

"After two or three months [of no postcards], we got a lot of emails and phone calls asking us, ‘Did you take me off your list?’ I figured if even 1% complained, then a much larger percentage were thinking about it," says Mr. Taffae, who restarted the postcard mailings in November.

William Kapas, president of J.C. Kapas Real Estate Co. in Rochelle Park, N.J., says he has secured clients as a result of his high-gloss, four-color monthly mailings that list who has bought or sold restaurant properties though the firm.

"Our clients look forward to knowing, and it’s a little bit of gossip, too," says Mr. Kapas, who exclusively uses traditional mail to reach clients. "I think it’s easier to delete the electronic junk mail without taking a second look."

Mr. Kapas spends about $1 a piece for the monthly mailings, sent to about 2,200 current and prospective customers.

Prof. Anderson says other business owners are trying to figure out how to integrate Web marketing—such as email campaigns, banner ads and social-networking sites—with direct mail. "The introduction of new media has forced [business owners] to go back and revisit the whole playbook on what’s the best way to communicate with customers," Mr. Anderson says.

plans to use e-marketing to complement the hand-signed direct-mail piece, not replace it.

Ms. Settle, for instance, plans to use e-marketing to complement the hand-signed direct-mail piece, not replace it.

Meanwhile, Mr. Taffae is starting to take his satirical marketing approach to YouTube; he’s created a parody of F Troop, the 1960s sitcom, to promote his firm online.

Ed. These stories are more common than many would like to admit, both here in NZ and overseas. Several catalogue mailers who took everything online last year are coming back to print, as email alone resulted in a major drop off in sales. The trick is how to effectively combine these media channels, in a cost-effective manner.  Analysing your customer base and segmentation I think is the key. Send printed plus online mailings to your top 40% of clients (who make up 80% of your sales), and online versions to the others – But always giving everyone the option of receiving either, or both versions.

Related Article: Direct Mail Brings 15% More Sales for Online Shop  and  Birthdays Bring in the Customers

Radio, TV, banner ads, pay-per-click (PPC), magazine ads, billboards… There are dozens if not hundreds of marketing channels you can use to get your sales message across. [Many marketers forget this]. We don’t expect you to use all of them all of the time – but you should know what your options are. Test different channels and different channel combinations, and roll out with what is most effective for you and your organization.

Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that if a specific channel does not meet the return on investment (ROI) goal for your overall multi-channel marketing campaign it should be disregarded.

Take a look at the chart below:

In this example, you are selling your product for $100. You had $85,000 to spend and your goal was to make $1.25 for every dollar you spent, or a return on investment of 125 percent.

You had tremendous success with your online efforts (endorsed e-mails, banner ads, and PPC campaigns). On your teleconference, your marketing efforts yielded a 90 percent ROI and lost $500. And on your direct-mail campaign, you produced only an 80 percent ROI, losing a whopping $10,000.

It has been our experience that customers who come in as a result of direct-mail efforts have a higher lifetime value.

Since two of your five channels lost a total of $10,500, are you going to cut them from your multi-channel campaign? Of course not. Those two channels brought in nearly 42 percent of your new customers. Customers you now have the opportunity to bond with and sell more products to. It has been our experience that customers who come in as a result of direct-mail efforts have a higher lifetime value. This means that the 400 new customers from your direct-mail campaign will most likely become your best customers. On top of all this, you’ve met your goal of 125 percent ROI on your overall campaign.

The idea is to subsidize some channels with the channels that have greater ROIs to produce incremental orders that can bring in additional revenues. The idea is to subsidize some channels with the channels that have greater ROIs to produce incremental orders that can bring in additional revenues.

Ed: This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a

P.S.  For those wanting to learn more about cross-channel marketing, MaryEllen has an amazing book on the topic entitled Changing the Channel. I read this over the Christmas break and it has to be one of the best, most objective and down-to-earth books on marketing I’ve found. Based on 20 years of real-world experience, not just theory. It’s a virtual case study on how a company achieved massive growth using direct response marketing, across multiple channels – Openly discussing what worked and what didn’t…

Every marketing student, entrepreneur and business owner should read this book

It covers must-know tricks on direct mail, email, search engines, telemarketing, social media, events, PR, print advertising, radio, TV and more. An easy-to-read book that puts it all into perspective – Something few marketing books or ‘experts’ do today, who all seem to have their own agendas and media biases.

This is the essential marketing handbook for any NZ business.

It can be purchased online from www.fishpond.co.nz

Here’s a short interview with MaryEllen

Making communications more personal and relevant, as well as more targeted and timely the key to profits

The international audit during 2008 of some 650 senior marketers revealed that making communications more personal and relevant, as well as more targeted and timely, was among the top strategies for realizing greater revenue and profitability from existing customers. Other leading strategies included addressing under-penetrated markets or new customer segments, as well as finding new ways to up-sell and cross-sell existing accounts.

The CMO study highlighted three key obstacles and deficiencies to overcome. This included:

• Lack of real-time data that captures across all customer touchpoints.
• Information not only being selectively gathered, but often inaccurate.
• Data restricted in its availability and use across the organization.

The core need for change  has been simmering for a while now. It started with that groundbreaking research by Romano and Broudy way back in 1999 who clearly established the benefits of  utilising client profiling and transactional data within marketing campaigns.

“It is inexplicable that the vast majority of marketers today are still struggling to source and extract meaningful insights from customer data at a behavioral, transactional and account value level,” noted CMO Council executive director Donovan Neale-May.

Hospitality and Retail have the biggest growth opportunities

An earlier Retail Trends Report in 2005 came to surprisingly similar conclusions to the CMO one. It concluded that retailers that take a customer-driven approach to marketing will be able to withstand the competition for dwindling discretionary income, and still have a productive and profitable. The key to success for small retailers is to identify their best customers, find potential niches to cater to, get to know what motivates customers and then interact as individually as possible.

Retail Trends Report suggests that retailers creating personal experiences and communications are those most likely to come out ahead. Personalising the selling experience and marketing messages will help to level the playing field between small and larger retailers.

According to Gary Wright, of Wright Marketing who specialise in retail strategies, "Technology today puts personalised communications within the reach of every retailer, regardless of size. With new database and digital press technology, small retailers can affordably engage in one-on-one communications which has been proven to significantly increase a customer’s brand loyalty and lifetime value."

when you communicate with a known customer, you are 5 times more likely to generate a response and a sale

Wright encourages retailers to explore database programmes and digital production opportunities that will merge customer data with promotional materials in order to produce personalised and highly relevant materials at a fraction of traditional printing costs. His report indicates that when you communicate with a known customer, you are 5 times more likely to generate a response and a sale. When you add customer-specific information from a database to that correspondence, the potential increase jumps to 13 times.

Loyalty marketing guru Rafi Albo knows all this well. He’s shown us in his own retail sector numerous examples that gained a 15-35% response / voucher redemption rate. Winston Marsh also provided some handy tips for small retailers where he touched upon the benefits of using the internet and email in innovative ways. Now, in 2009, we can add in mobile TXT messaging and QR barcodes.

The opportunities here for all retailers, restaurants and the hospitality sectors are immense, but like any marketing strategy, expert planning and execution is the key to success.  Call us on 027 244 4884 to discuss how we can together devise a retail marketing plan to suit your industry or market sector.

If you want more information on the Routes to Revenue study go to  the CMO web site at http://www.cmocouncil.org/index.asp.

Kevin Trye

According to David Wauters, director of marketing for Bare Necessities, the company saw a 15% lift in revenue (that’s not a response rate improvement, but bottom-line sales improvement), from customers who received both the direct mail postcard AND the e-mail, compared to the control group who received only the e-mail.

Wauters has apparently stumbled on something that a lot of marketers talk about, but seldom do. According to Jane Kaiser, president of online marketing consultancy Eclipse Direct Marketing who work with Bare Necessities, few marketers truly coordinate their email and print marketing efforts.

She said her clients consistently see lifts of between 15% and 25% when they send coordinated print and e-mail campaigns. To us it’s no magic formula, simply common sense.

Like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the e-mail and direct mail channels can make beautiful footwork solo. But when you pair them up for the right number, the result is electric—higher response rates, higher average order value and higher lifetime value. And in a tight economy, what company doesn’t want its marketing dollars to stretch farther?

Most Still Prefer Real Stores

Surprisingly, it is often easier to entice people to visit a physical store to buy, than to get them to visit and then complete a webform or a transaction at an online store. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for retailers – But why is this? If companies spend ten of thousands to build a fancy ecommerce website, they expect online sales to follow…

For answers, visit FutureNow Inc. Co-founder Bryan Eisenberg is widely regarded as the world’s leading authority on how to improve your ecommerce site effectiveness and sales conversions. Where others struggle to get 1-2% sales conversions, through Bryans efforts, website owners can achieve ten times this, ensuring a huge ROI.

Web Designers Still Miss the Mark

Bryan’s proven techniques often conflict with established wisdom and so-called experts in website design. Their focus is the creative art, believing that a good looking site will turn into more people buying. Unfortunately this is seldom the case.

Bryan’s focus on the sales process, website copy, backend optimisation, tracking and testing brings amazing bottom-line results. He fills an important void in the industry, bringing new strategies and tools often overlooked at of our web design schools.

However statistics aren’t always what they seem and this is commonly the case on the web where bold claims are commonplace. It’s a great place for scammers. In this case the 35% claim was technically correct, but I eventually discovered that the 35% came from an increase in response from 1.0 to 1.35%, which in real world terms for this particular client, only turned into a few more sales. A small handful of dollars…

It depends who you are too. If you are a corporate with huge client database and levels of web traffic then the above could be cause for celebration, even though total response is relatively low. We see this with direct mail and catalogues in our mailbox each week. A 1% sales response on a 250,000 letterbox drop will most often pay for itself. However the mailing size (email or printed) for the vast majority of businesses here is typically under 2,000, often just a few hundred.

It’s also to do with expectations. To me, a 1 or even a 2% response rate is dismal. Our sights should be much higher than this. In the new world of targeted, permission-based marketing, be it online or offline, we should be aiming for double figures. i.e. 10-20%

the response rate was always people who actually bought, not those that showed interest or filled in a web form.

There’s a lot of misinformation going on out there. Big numbers claimed, but when you convert it into actual sales, there’s very little to show. As loyalty marketer Rafi Albo commented in his seminars here last year, response rates can be measured in many ways. To Rafi, who worked mainly in retail (which focuses more on the bottom line than most online stores), the response rate was always people who actually bought product, not those that showed interest or filled in a web form.

So, when your website developer, marketing person or ad agency gives you a response rate figure, ask them what they mean. Is this a percentage improvement or actual? Are these window shoppers, or real buyers?

What’s changed over the last few years to be able to do this in colour and in a highly graphical, stunning manner. The rationale is to create a good first impression and entice the recipient to respond. This is especially vital in loyalty programs, be they sent by post or electronically. It seems to work too, since targeted, highly personalised communications obtains an average 4-5% response rate instead of the industry standard 1-2%. (Experts like Rafi Albo typically achieve over 15%)

Below are some examples of what’s possible today, giving that real WOW factor. Note these ‘named images’ are not generated individually by a human using Photoshop, but generated dynamically, automatically, often at a rate of hundreds per minute, based upon names in a simple database file.

What’s more, it’s not just restricted to direct mail and printed media, but possible to incorporate low resolution versions within graphically personalised emails, website landing pages and mobile phone messages!

Look for a lot more of this in your mailbox (paper and electronic) over the coming years.

They provide us some real-world numbers of how cost-effective new PURL marketing can be compared with traditional methods of sales lead generation.

In a large campaign over many months, they expertly compared the effectiveness of traditional print advertising effort against a cross-media PURL Marketing system.

Results summary:

• Traditional Print Advertising – Total responses = 37.
  Cost per lead: $2,520.95
• PURL marketing – Leads = 1399 (26% av. response rate).
  Average cost per lead $128.08

These figures leave most marketers speechless. And for the client, it provided a healthy 1,700% revenue increase.

We’ve discovered here how a combined cross-media campaign using personalised print, email and purl website landing page, together with it’s expert tracking and salesperson follow-up, is more effective (200 times more in this case), than the traditional way of sales and marketing.

Source article by Heidi Tolliver Nigro

42% prefer to respond to a promotion online – Let’s make it more inviting and easier for them

The concept has have been around for several years, but only now with improved tools is it exploding and taking one-to-one marketing and lead generation to new heights. It encourages the growing numbers of people who prefer to respond to a promotion online, regardless of whether they heard about it from a friend, in an email, text, direct mail piece or personalised brochure.

PURLs are purpose-built web ‘landing pages’ with a strong call to action. They’re rapidly becoming the gems of the net. Key benefits: