Some Customers Still Hard to Reach by Email

Did you know that, even in today’s multichannel media environment, some customer segments are more difficult to reach by email than others? For example . . .

• 41% of U.S. consumers aged 65+ still do not have Internet access.
• 53% of U.S. consumers in this group do not have broadband.
• 18% of these consumers do not have smartphones.[1]

Particularly for older retirees in lower income households, print remains a critical part of the multichannel mix. For many, it may be the only way to reach them. Even those who do go online may require text-only emails rather than the HTML versions many marketers are geared up to send.

But before you write off U.S. retirees as non-email-reading, non-Internet using consumers, remember that not all consumer segments look the same. In fact, among younger, more affluent, and more educated retirees, 90% have Internet access and 82% have broadband. That’s higher than the U.S. adult population overall. For this segment, email is an important tool for marketing communication, both as a primary means of messaging or as a follow-up to print communications.

So before you reach out, know your audience, their media use, and their channel preferences. It can have a critical impact on your multichannel mix.

Need help figuring it out? Give us a call.

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[1] Pew Research Center (April 2014)

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

Winston Churchill

5 Direct Mail “Must Dos”

Want to ensure that your direct mail is in line with today’s best practices? Here are 5 items that should be on every marketer’s “must do” list.

1. Focus on relevance, not volume: Marketers are moving away from commoditized, undifferentiated direct mail. They are leveraging customer demographics, purchase patterns, and preferences to increase response rates and drive revenue growth. According to a March 2014 study from Adobe,[1] “personalization” ranked #1 on marketers’ lists of priorities this year.

2. Sometimes less is more: By focus on creating relevance, not volume, this often means smaller, more targeted mailings. Only with personalized, relevance-based marketing can you mail less and get more.

3. Think efficiency: Better data cleansing and updating of mailing lists (eliminating UAA, or “undeliverable as addressed” mail) not only increases marketing efficiency, but it saves on postage, too.

4. Use triggered mail: Marketing effectiveness increases when you are mailing at the very time the customer is ready to buy. “Triggered” messaging does just that. Take an automotive manufacturer that sends out 1:1 mailers to alert customers when their vehicles are due for scheduled maintenance based on their last service call. Or a florist that advertises discounts to customers with family members with birthdays or anniversaries that week. Triggered mail magnifies the impact of personalization.

5. Be willing to stretch yourself: Don’t get stuck in a rut. In the same Adobe study, 54% of marketers said they believe the ideal marketer should take more risks and 45% hope to take more risks themselves. How will you know what works best for you if you don’t stretch yourself by trying something new once in awhile?

Talk to us about new ideas and new techniques for personalizing, using triggers, and increasing the relevance of your campaigns to boost your results.

¹ “Digital Roadblock: Marketers Struggle to Reinvent Themselves” (Adobe, March 2014)

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

Persistence can change failure into extraordinary achievement.

Matt Biondi

Can 1:1 Printing Save You Money? Yes!

Most marketers define the success of a print marketing campaign in terms of what they gain — responses, conversions, or dollars flowing into the cash register. But you can also define success by the money you save. Let’s look at three ways 1:1 printing can improve the bottom line through cost savings, not just boosting responses and revenues.  

1. Lower cost of attrition. If your goal is to prevent customer attrition, you can evaluate the success of your campaign based on what sales stay rather than what sales merely come in. One marketer of high-end vacations saved millions, for example, by sending vacationers 100% personalized booklets that reinforce their vacation choices. Its cancellation rates plummeted, and it kept customer sales where they belonged — in its pockets.

2. Less handholding. What if you could use 1:1 printing to reduce calls to your customer service team? Questions about invoicing and payment cost real money. By personalizing its tax letters, for example, one state government’s tax bureau made these letters easier to read. The result was a noticeable drop in calls to its call centers, and the state saved hundreds of thousands of dollars.

3. Faster response times. The faster customers pay, the better your cash flow. Take the example above. By using personalized printing to make its statements easier to read, this state government not only reduced the number of taxpayer calls, but it started receiving its revenues days earlier. As a result, it significantly boosted its earnings from interest.

Not included in this case study but very real to most marketers is the fact that more on-time payments also mean less time and money spent on duplicate invoicing and follow-up calls for non-payment.

Reducing customer attrition and making their invoices and customer statements easier to read and understand are not the “sexy” benefits of 1:1 printing we hear about the most, but they are real, bottom-line benefits that do not get talked about enough!

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

It's not the will to win that matters--everyone has that.  It's the will to prepare to win that matters.

Paul "Bear" Bryant

3 Ways to Measure Success

It is always critical to quantify the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. But how do you define success? Particularly with 1:1 printing, you have to use the right yardstick. If you are like most marketers, you might be used to thinking in terms of response rates, but let’s look at three less commonly used (but more critical) metrics to keep in mind.

1. Cost per lead. Typically, marketers are used to thinking about cost per piece, and with traditional direct mail in the $.10 range, it’s hard for 1:1 print marketing to compete on a cost basis. But everything changes when you look at what your program costs per lead rather than per piece.

If you mail 100,000 postcards at $.25 each (including postage), that’s a project cost of $25,000. If that campaign achieves a 1% response rate, that’s 250 leads at a cost of $100 per lead. On the other hand, if you mail 25,000 1:1 postcards at a cost of $1.00 each, that is still a project cost of $25,000. But if you achieve a 12% response rate, that’s 3,000 leads. Now your cost per lead drops to $8.33!

2. Cost per sale. Not all leads translate into sales. Divide the number of people who actually make a purchase into your total costs and this will give you the cost per sale. If only 33% of respondents to these hypothetical campaigns make a purchase, your cost per sale is $300 for the static campaign, while for the 1:1 campaign, it is $25.00.

3. Lifetime customer value. The value of the sale often goes beyond the initial purchase. If 1:1 personalization woos the buyer of one make of car to another, and if that customer becomes loyal to that brand, the return on investment from that piece includes the value of every car purchased by that customer over his or her lifetime. This is an important metric for marketers of long-term purchases, such as automobiles, financial products, and insurance.

The bottom line? Before you measure your results in any print campaign, make sure you understand all of the available measuring sticks, then use the one(s) that are the most impactful for you. 

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development 

I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded.  In fact, if anything, I am the prod.

Winston Churchhill

I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded. In fact, if anything, I am the prod.

Winston Churchill

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_business.html#p5G9J4b746sIO9eJ.99

Multi-Channel Leads Marketers’ Strategies

If you like multi-channel marketing, here is some good news. According to a survey conducted by WoodWing Software, you’re about to get more of it.

In a survey of publishers, advertising agencies, and in-house marketing departments, WoodWing found that in terms of their marketing mix, 59% favor a combination of print, web, mobile, tablet, and social media.  

Which channels do publishers look to first?

·        22% favor a print-first strategy

·        6% favor a web-first strategy

·        5% favor a mobile-first approach

·        2% favor a social-media-first strategy

Respondents’ main reasons for using social media? Brand awareness. When it comes to communicating the marketing message, however, print remains king.

Why does print remain the dominant form of marketing? Perhaps for a reason no more complicated than people still like going to the mailbox. Unlike email inboxes, which can fill up with hundreds of emails in a single day, the mailbox delivers a handful of mail that most people enjoy sorting through. It’s like a treasure hunt. You never know what’s in there.

Unlike an email subject line, envelopes deliver interest and engagement before they are even opened. Colors, windows, and on-envelope messaging and personalization all offer forms of engagement. Then there are the benefits of other mailing formats, such as postcards, trifold mailers, and three-dimensional mail, which offer even more engagement.

The takeaway? For best results, use social media for branding. Tap into email for reminders, follow-ups, and short-term offers. But keep print as the foundation and bedrock of your marketing. 

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

It's good sportsmanship to not pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.

Mark Twain

Using the “Describe and Predict” Model

Want to knock your 1:1 (personalized) printing campaign out of the park? Do more than personalize the document. Use your data to describe and predict.

The process starts with understanding what your customers look like. Do a basic database analysis. What is their mix of ages, incomes, genders, and races? Where do they live? Then filter this customer information through general demographic and psychographic patterns to predict their behavior. Let’s look at a simplified example.

Say you are an auto dealership and discover that your lease customers fall into three basic categories: young singles, families, and retirees.

Because these are all current customers, you know their ages, incomes and ages of their children (if any) at the time of initial lease. You know their current vehicles and the options selected. This allows you to match appropriate upsells and cross-sells based on the likely needs of each group.

• In the young singles category, for example, it would be reasonable to assume that, after five years, they might have higher earning power. At the end of a five-year lease, you might be able to trade them up to the next class of vehicle with more options.
• In the families with young children category, you might assume that, after five years, they might have had more children. If they currently lease a sedan, they might need to move into something larger like a minivan or crossover vehicle. Families with older children might need to move into a vehicle with greater towing and storage capacity.
• In the retiree category, customers might be looking to downsize. Those with higher levels of disposable income might be looking for sportier cars or luxury vehicles.

In all cases, you know when the customer will act—at the end of the lease period. This information in hand, you can craft marketing campaigns with appropriate messages, offers and incentives.

Your customer base might look different than the one described here, of course, but you can use this process against your own customer mix. Just remember the letters “d” and “p”: describe, then predict.

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

Don't measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.

John Wooden

Best Practices in 1:1 Printing

If you want great marketing results, it’s important to personalize text, images, and other content based on what you know about the recipient. But just dropping in data-driven content doesn’t guarantee success. Sometimes other factors can dull your results. Maybe the offer is great, but the design is so uninteresting that nobody reads it. Or the headline is snappy and the design is great, but there is no incentive for people to respond.

Let’s look at three best practices that need to be the foundation of any 1:1 print marketing campaign.

• Traditional marketing rules apply. 1:1 might be personalized marketing, but traditional rules hold firm. Ultimately, all of the elements — creative, message (including personalization), offer, segmentation, call to action, and incentive —need to come together to determine success. 
• Focus on relevance, not “personalization.” It doesn’t matter how “personalized” a document is. If it isn’t relevant, it is worthless. Take the shoe market. Clearly, you don’t want to market orthopedic shoes to teenagers. You can deck out the mailer with text messaging terms, pictures of X-Games, and use all the contemporary lingo, but it’s not a relevant message unless a teen needs to purchase a birthday present for grandpa.
• Know your customers, then market to what you know. When the National Hockey League began 1:1 communication with its customers, it asked them to fill out a survey that indicated that 40% of the of NHL’s fan base lives outside their favorite team’s home market. That means these fans can’t easily go to games or access highlights. Imagine the opportunity for the league! So ask yourself, what don’t you know about your customers now that might allow you to create relevance in a more powerful way later? Do a customer mail or email survey. Use what you find out to speak directly to the needs and interests of your customers.

Investing in your marketing database and developing an intimate understanding of your customers takes time, dedicated resources, and manpower, but it is one of the most important investments you can make. Personalization is a powerful tool, but to get the big pay-off, it cannot work alone.

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all time thing. You don’t win once in a while, you don’t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.

Vince Lombardi