Email learns another trick from Snail Mail

This isn’t exactly state-of-the-art news for old hands at direct mail, but apparently emailers have discovered that personalization pays.

Duh!

We’re not talking about gratuitous, unnecessary personalization, mind you. (Like the infamous 1960’s piece that blared “YOU’RE THE ONLY HOME IN [NAME OF CITY] TO RECEIVE THIS IMPORTANT LETTER!”) which was a nice showcase for early direct marketers to practice basic personalization skills. It was just a warm up. The encore. But more—and better—was to come.

Personalization should make a difference in the context and flow of the message. Good personalization should sound conversational, not stilted. It should sound natural, not computer generated. And it should allow for records that have null sets or voids in fields from which the data is being pulled.

Using personalization well shows the recipient that the sender has been paying attention. For instance, “Thank you for your gift of $25. With it we have….” Or “Thank you for your recent purchase of ________” or “We’re delighted that you have enrolled in our ____________ program to ___________” etc. Personalization isn’t only about names, places and dollar amounts.

Bottom line: Using personalization well reinforces the relationship between sender and recipient. Using it poorly doesn’t.

Direct mail figured this one out 50 years ago. Welcome aboard, newbies.

…So we ratchet it up!

Just about the time direct marketers got the personalization thing down pat, technology opens new doors. Change is the only constant.

PURLs—the latest and greatest “in thing” in direct marketing—take personalization to the next level.

If LinkedIn is networking on speed, PURLs are personalization on steroids. They are bigger and stronger yet amazingly flexible. Mark Maguire notwithstanding.

Combining the best of individually printed digitally produced direct mail and individually personalized web-based landing pages, PURLs turn one-directional communications into a conversation.

We write you…you are interested in our message…you go to the PURL site we’ve set up specifically for you…you respond, giving us additional information that we can then respond to in our next communication…which drives you to a successive PURL etc.

With each conversational loop we find out more about you—your needs, wants, interests—and we respond to you accordingly. The exchange lets you know we are listening to you…responding to you…building a relationship with you.

And we can do each PURL cycle one-to-one. No mass-produced awkward-sounding personalization…but it is done for the one individual to whom we’re sending it. Yes indeed, PURLs are personalization on the next level.

Want to know more about PURLs? Want to know how they can help you generate business, reduce cost and increase ROI? Call us.

We’ll help you hit one out of the park.

Marketing in Miserable Times

The economy is slow. That doesn’t mean your marketing should be!

I admit it. This article may appear to be a bit self-serving. But it is also intended to help you survive the interminable recession. After all, marketing is the first department cut in bad times, so you’re probably trying to survive with a skeleton crew.

If you’re like most of us, your first inclination is to tighten your belt. That’s what Kmart did during the 2001 recession. After two months of decreasing its marketing, Kmart saw sales drop 5%. Bottom line: Kmart lost more in sales than they saved in advertising costs.

Kmart’s blunder is borne out by studies dating back two generations to the Great Depression. A 1927 study shows that companies which invested their marketing dollars well in the depth of the Depression gained market share and kept the momentum going afterwards. Companies that cut back were cut out.

If data from 1927 sounds like ancient history and therefore not applicable to today’s world, consider a 1993 study published by Penton Media which said “businesses that maintain aggressive marketing programs during a recession outperform companies that rely more on cost cutting measures.”

OK, cutting costs is truly important. Duh! But cutting communications with your base is cutting your own throat. Smart companies continue the dialogue, even in hard times. They listen and they learn.

Communicate with your customers. Email,…direct mail…telephone…visit them in person. You pick the method. Mix ‘em and match ‘em. But keep the channels of communication open.

Look for ways to differentiate yourself from the other guys. Use ideas, formats and technologies that maybe your base or industry hasn’t seen before.

Sure, you say. It’s Big Talk, but we have no budget.

So you think you’re different from everybody else out there? A small budget is just a big opportunity to be more creative!

If you’ve got nothing to invest but sweat equity, here are several ideas that might just help.

#1. Offer your customers and prospects something that they need. Something truly useful. It can be a whitepaper on your own industry trends (if you’re academically ambitious), a coupon (great for retailers), or an email newsletter providing relevant tips (it works—after all, you’re reading one now!)

#2. Promote your special offering through an online channel like a blog, e-newsletter or twitter. Point to a unique URL and require people to leave a small amount of personal data (name/address/phone/email) to “qualify” to receive the free info. Be sure to capture that data to track responses and capture potential sales leads.

#3. A number of industry websites are offering free whitepaper distribution. Simply let your industry association or leading industry publications know that you have created such a document and let them promote it for you, too.

#4. Seek out free publicity. For instance, one of our clients was recently featured in the Washingtonian Magazine as one of the best non-profits in the area. The extra coverage gave them great visibility and the third party blessing lent enormous credibility. Boy, did we make good use of that in their year-end appeal!

#5. Ask the eloquent and informed on your staff to do speeches at trade association meetings, chamber of commerce events, and other similar public events.

#6. Market your in-house experts to the media who always need a current list of who-knows-what about obscure topics. These in-house experts can keep your company name in the public eye and lend credibility to your company as leading industry experts.

#7. Recycle. Go to your industry periodicals and offer to write articles for them on leading indicators, trends, legislation that is changing your industry, etc. If you’ve done #1 and #5 above, the information is at your fingertips. Reuse it to your own benefit.

#8. Recycle the recycling. Go to your customer’s industry periodicals and offer the same information. Be sure to re-package it to get rid of any inherent industry jargon that may have crept in when you wrote for your own peers.

If you’re lucky enough to have a bit of coin to spend on direct marketing, here are some ideas that cost, but can have big pay-offs, too! Use techniques and technologies that your customers and prospects haven’t seen before. It will make you stand out from the clutter.

#9. One of our clients launched a PURL (personalized URL) program to better communicate with its marketbase. The two-way communications channel is open 24/7 and is exceeding expectations so far.

#10. Another client is using VDP—Variable Data Printing—to market to his base. If you bought a blue Camry from this dealership in 2002, then your “Buy Back” postcard shows a blue 2002 Camry. The client is using variable graphics the way other people use variable data. Eye catching? Attention grabbing? You bet! The last postcard sold 47 cars in one weekend!

#11. Another client is using VDP to create customized brochures which he is using as a “leave behind” when he markets his services to prospects. Each brochure has the name of the buyer and his/her company prominently printed on it in color. He’d have to create a leave-behind piece anyway. For just a bit more money, he’s got a truly eye-popping document that says a lot about his firm and how innovative it is.
See where this is heading? Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees. Sometimes you just need to brainstorm with someone else.

There are a lot of no-cost and low-cost ideas that we can use to help you promote your company. Additionally, we’re bursting with ideas and energy to help you make your marketing the most innovative stuff around.

Call Ellen at Paul&Partners (703-996-0800) if you want someone to bounce ideas off. Or if you need an “out of the box” thinker to help you a bit.

Remember, when times are tough, the tough get going. Which side of the fence are YOU sitting on?

Paul & Partners Direct Marketing

43670 Trade Center Place,

Suite 150,

Dulles, VA 20166

Phone: 703.996.0800 Fax: 703.996.0888 1.866.365.2858

www.paulandpartners.net sales@paulandpartners

Get Personal. Get Results. (Part 1 of 3)

Get Personal. Get Results.
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

If you’re thinking this article is another how-to guide with sure-fire tips to success in the sack, you’re wrong. So sorry to disappoint.

But if you think this article is how to make your direct marketing better, then you just got lucky. Read on!

Creating effective direct marketing is a lot like dating.

In dating, the more you know about the individual you’re going out with, the better your date can go. You know what to say, how to say it, and when to shut up and listen. A good date necessitates 2-way communication. As you learn more, you get better and better at communicating with the other person. A relationship develops.

Similarly, in direct marketing, the more you know about the individual recipient of your message, the better and more targeted you can make your approach to him or her.

Suppose you care passionately about a park proposed for your community. You decide to send a letter to everybody in 2-mile area asking for support. That is shot gun marketing. Not everyone is a donor. Not everyone cares. Even the small fraction of people who are donors may not care a whit about your park. It’s rough out there, Baby.

But send that same message to those people who are most likely to agree with you, and your success rate increases exponentially. Who are these folks? Bicyclers, campers, hikers, bird watchers, nature lovers of all stripes. They are your go-to constituency.

Blind dates and non-targeted “shot gun” marketing both have the same abysmal result: They are expensive, frustrating, usually doomed to failure. There has to be a better way.

While people who continue to go out on blind dates get what they deserve, marketers have indeed found a better way to find out whom they are approaching.

But first, a brief history of getting personal in direct marketing…

50 years ago, the height of getting personal in marketing was using the recipient’s name and address in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. All of us over a certain age remember getting letters that read in part

Dear WILLIAM E. JOHNSON,

The WILLIAM E. JOHNSON household is one of the few households in
SEVERNA PARK, MARYLAND receiving this letter…

In this Pleistocene era before computers became ubiquitous, this ALL CAPS stuff was sophisticated marketing. Recipients had never seen their names in print, much less their city and state. It stopped them in their tracks. It was revolutionary. It was wildly successful. For a time.
The quirky ALL CAPS novelty wore off quickly, so then marketers went to less obvious upper/lower casing. But the information content was unchanged. For years all marketers had to work with was the recipient’s name and address. We needed help.

In the 1960’s lists got more sophisticated. Soon 35,000+ lists were on the rental market, with each list purporting to be the absolutely best list available of people with some common interest or need. This was an improvement. Marketers could at least select recipient lists based on some common criterion.

But even that improvement was not enough. Not every list could be absolutely the best, nor even relevant. After all, one of the best producing lists of all time was a list of households that owned vacuum cleaners! What did owning a vacuum have to do with the price of tea in China?

OK, it wasn’t great, but it was getting better. We could at least choose our lists based on donor history, magazine subscriptions, membership in clubs and associations, and other general indicators.

Still, marketers only had a minimum amount of generalized information about the target group as a whole. Even with the advent of “selects” which allowed us to “drill down deeper” we lacked specificity about the individuals who comprised that amorphous whole.

The revolution began with the advent of inexpensive computers in the 1970s and 80s. As more organizations could afford computers (remember at the beginning of time, computer time that is, world experts predicted that only 24 computers could run the whole world!) the rules changed again.

Companies and organizations could keep their own data. They could keep it in greater depth, tracking such things as most recent donation/purchase and highest donation/purchase. There was a gleam in marketers’ eyes as we saw the possibilities.

It was another big improvement when we got selects for gender and implied age on consumer lists. It helped even more when we got selects for job title, company size (by number of employees or annual billings), and industry type on business-to-business lists.

Sure, we had some idea of who these people were and what they wanted/believed in/bought into (that’s what put them on the list probably, and what list research is supposed to ferret out, after all). But we also knew that good marketing copy is written by one individual to another individual. It’s one-to-one. It’s about being personal.

We needed more. And in just the last few years we finally got what we needed.

Today, there are dozens of data “filters” through which we can run lists to “data mine” the demographic and psychographic composition of the list.

OK, that’s a big mouthful. What it means is that finally we can determine the gender, age, marital status, ethnicity, language preference, household income, homeowner or renter, presence of children, personal interests, hobbies, credit worthiness, religious and political affiliations of individuals on lists. And that’s just for starters!

Filters can help determine education level, likely profession and level within that profession, as well as the car they drive and the music they listen to. We may know more about them than their Mothers!

What can we do with all this info, really? The goal is to take this new-found knowledge and use it well.

Part II of this series addresses what some innovative marketers are doing to use personalization in their prospect mailings.

===

Get Personal. Get Results.
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

43670 Trade Center Place, Suite 150, Dulles, VA 20166
Phone: 703.996.0800 Fax: 703.996.0888 1.866.365.2858
http://www.paulandpartners.net/ sales@paulandpartners

Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend...Sometimes.

…and sometimes it’s PURLs!

PURLs (Personalized URLs) are the latest and greatest marketing tool to hit the street this decade. And that’s saying a lot.

It works like this: a savvy marketer (OK, we’ll assume it’s you, wise and wonderful friend) has asked Paul&Partners to help you (that’s the part that makes you both wise and wonderful!)

First P&P sends a letter or postcard to your intended audience. The card invites the recipient to “go to this website I’ve created for you” to learn more about blah blah blah.

The invitation P&P has created for you has the recipient’s name in color so it’s very obvious. (Remember, people always love to see their names in print. Color ensures they will see it.) So the curious recipient checks it out. Voila! He’s entered the wonderful world of PURLs.

On his personal URL, you greet him by name. You give him content of value—something of real interest and benefit (read the previous article on marketing to Gen-Xers). Maybe you ask a couple of questions that are apropos to your better understanding his needs (ie “I’ll be ready to buy this item in 1 week…1 month…6 months”). Maybe you give him a link to your main web page where he can get more in-depth information. Certainly you ask for any contact information you don’t have embedded in the PURL site already.

So far so good, right? I’m just getting started.

Assuming he answers some of your questions, he’s giving you important marketing intelligence so you can tell how to better approach him next time.

If he didn’t answer your questions, you can at least see what he read and how long he stayed on your site. So you can ascertain his level of interest and in what specific areas he has interest.

Tres’ cool, indeed. But it gets better.

When he logs off, you know instantaneously who has visited, what list he’s from, what he read, how long he stayed, if he linked to your main webpage, and if he answered any of your questions. In other words, you know a lot about your visitor.

He’s left his footprints for you to follow. He’s telling you what you need to do to address him more pertinently in the future. He’s started a conversation with you, and now it’s up to you to respond appropriately.

But wait! There’s even more!

If you’re a certified number-crunching marketer then you should be delighted to know that the P&P’s PURL software can also give you the statistics you want…and can give them to you real time. So you know how many people have responded from each list…what the percent return is for each list…how many people say they want to buy your gizmo in one week…etc.

But perhaps you’re not selling gizmos. So what can you use a PURL to do?

Track alumni…accept contributions…make reservations…solicit volunteers…determine interest levels for various projects and programs…get people motivated and involved in a cause or issue…or just about anything else that could benefit from an informed two-way conversation between you and your constituency.

It’s useful for anybody who has something to market; it’s a good information exchange for the recipient; and it helps to build your relationship.

Do PURLs increase response rate? Absolutely! We’ve seen responses of over 4% on cold prospecting, and triple that on a housefile project.

Are PURLs expensive? Depends on your perspective. To get your usual predictable response rate, you can mail smaller quantities, so you save on production and postage. Or you can send more and see more results. But of course, setting up a PURL campaign does have a cost. Duh.

Want to know more about how PURLs can boost your marketing efforts? Curious about integrating PURLs into your marketing toolkit? Call Paul&Partners (703-996-0800) for the word on this newest direct marketing technology.

PURLs, anyone? They can be worth their weight in gold.

43670 Trade Center Place, Suite 150, Dulles, VA 20166
Phone: 703.996.0800 Fax:703.996.0888
www.paulandpartners.net sales@paulandpartners