How to Improve Your Response Rates
I’ve organised a fair few email and telemarketing campaigns recently and one thing that has stood out as having a huge impact on response rates is the importance of properly segmented contact data. In any direct marketing campaign you will only get a good response if your message is well targeted and relevant to your audience. It stands to reason therefore the broader the audience, the broader your message will have to be and the less likely you are to hit the spot.
Photo courtesy of Skyliner via Flickr
What do I mean by properly segmented data?
Essentially I’m talking about separating your contact data into target groups of people who are likely to share the same:
- Interests
- Income
- Geographic locations
- Hobbies and past times
- A.N. Other factor by which you can group your customers / prospective customers into similar groups
By effectively segmenting your data you are able to develop a much more targeted and rich message for your audience. The result of this should be an improved response from your direct marketing campaign.
How do you know what the correct segmentation criteria are?
I would take a first step of looking at your existing customers. Are they mostly male or female, what age and income bracket do they fall into, do they live in a particular part of town, or have a certain type of career, have they tended to approach your company by phone or email etc etc.
For one of my clients I know that the decision maker is often the lady of the house, but the finance behind the decision lies with the husband. Therefore we need to appeal to two audiences with a slightly different message - one reaching out with a story around monetary value gained from buying our service, the other in terms of lifestyle enhancement. This is where well segmented data comes in very useful because not only can we tailor the message for each group, but we can also tailor the medium i.e. email for one and a posted letter for the other.
It is certainly no different in B2B marketing, although your decision maker is likely to be influenced by many more people or layers within the organisation. As such, you will want to have different messages and approaches for each audience. If you are selling stationery for example, you may want to influence the day to day decision makers i.e. office managers, by sending a box of chocolates with a personalised message, but for the Finance Director, you should perhaps think about a different medium.
Of course, for both business and consumers, you will want to consider which stage your target customers are at in the buying cycle. But that’s a whole different kettle of fish. If you are running direct marketing campaigns, make sure you avoid the elephant gun approach of blasting your message at everyone who’s prepared to listen.
Segment your data, refine your message and see your response rates start to climb from those depressingly low numbers every direct marketer has experienced at some point.
Tag:direct marketing
10 Step Direct Marketing Campaign
I’ve been working on a direct marketing project for a client recently and though I might share with you the 10 core steps we took during this campaign. 
As a quick introduction, the client was a professional services firm wanting to reach out to a business audience to generate leads / appointments for a referral building campaign.
Well, here goes..
The Planning Phase
1. Setting our objectives before we started helped us to shape the strategy and tactics behind the campaign. We decided what we wanted to achieve and what success would look like which included:
- to increase awareness of the referral programme within target audience
- to generate X appointments with key decision makers
- to sign-up X new partners to the programme
2. The next step was to define our target audiences. As the campaign was fairly specific, we identified our target by geography, company type, company size and key decision maker. These criteria enabled us to establish their potential value of the target audience and any specific needs and requirements, essential for us in the next step - defining the media selection.
3. When defining the campaign, we had in mind a direct mail piece as being the core piece of communication. However after more careful thought about our target market, we quickly updated not only the type of direct mailer (content, format and messaging) but also the need to support the mailing with a telemarketing piece. This step was therefore about refining the format of the direct media format.
4. Once we had defined the objectives, target audience, the media selection, we moved on to timing. When would be a good time to send the mailer and when would be good to follow-up with the telemarketing.
After careful consideration, we opted to ensure the mailer or telephone calls were not received on a Monday or a Friday and all calls would not be made first thing in the morning, when our target audience is at it’s busiest. We also considered time of the year and decided to act before we hit August, the key holiday period.
Buying the Data
5. With all of the planning out of the way, it was time to acquire some data. I wanted to run a sample to test our creative and messaging before buying any data. This helped us to better refine our buying requirements, for example through clearly identifying who the core decision makers would be. As such we compiled a short data list through our own research, generating a 10% sample size.
6. Following this test we were in a good position to buy data that accurately reflected our target audience. For some guidance on buying data, I refer you to an excellent book called ‘The B2B Handbook, A Guide to achieving success in business-to-business direct marketing’.
Produced in association with the Direct Marketing Association and various professional consultancies, its guidelines include:
- remember all charges when calculating a cost per thousand – watch out for those extra charges some data list providers add on top
- check the recency of the data you are buying – did you know that some data lists decay at a rate of 40% each year. As such, check with the list provider how recent the data is and ensure you receive the most recent data – otherwise you may well be wasting you money
- negotiate usage in advance – make sure if you plan on multiple contacts with your list that you pay upfront as it can be costly if you want to buy re-use of the data – data is bought in single or multi use rates.
For more ideas, I strongly recommend buying the book - ‘The B2B Handbook, A Guide to achieving success in business-to-business direct marketing’.
Of course there are plenty of options for acquiring data, from in-house (i.e. your own data), to custom research (as we conducted for the test) to list brokers and data owners. Each offers it’s own advantages and disadvantages, which you ought to consider carefully before proceeding.
Executing the Campaign
7. The test campaign enabled us to identify the core messages that worked well with the mailer and the telemarketing campaign. We know as we asked for feedback from our sample as to why they did or didn’t respond. We then applied these lessons directly to the main campaign, refining our direct mail piece to a personalised letter with clear product examples. Again, for some guidance on how to structure the content of your creative, I would refer you to ‘The B2B Handbook, A Guide to achieving success in business-to-business direct marketing’.
8. We decided to fulfil the mailer and telemarketing in-house in order to save on the costs. The mailer was personalised and each one signed in ink by a company director to add the additional touch. The telemarketing was handled by the marketing department to ensure the follow-up was appropriately managed and sales scripts adhered to - although of course there are plenty of high quality agencies that can fulfil on both of these counts.
9. Along with running the campaign, we planned the resources required to enable effective follow-up. This included providing resources online for target decision makers to acquire additional information, training incoming call staff on how to deal with enquiries, setting up the database to be properly updated and more. This alignment ensured we were able to manage responses to the mailer and telemarketing.
The Aftermath
10. The final step of the campaign was to analyse how well we had performed. We of course looked at the response we had generated, but also what the cost per acquisition was. This is useful for comparing the campaign to other marketing tactics.
We also looked for patterns in the response rates, considering what company sizes responded better, which decision makers carried the most weight, whether any of the geographies we targeted offered a better success rate. All of which will be helpful for our next campaign. Overall it was a very successful campaign and even where we didn’t receive a positive result we learned a few lessons for next time around.
Now I know this isn’t a perfect example of a direct marketing campaign, but for small companies, it might give you a few ideas and some structure to work with. As ever I’d be delighted to hear from anyone who would like to tell our readers about a recent direct marketing campaign – successful or not.
Tag:direct marketingDirect marketing - when to communicate?
In advising a client about telemarketing recently, I was asked the question “when should we call our prospects to get the best response?”.
A very good question and unfortunately not one that I had a solid answer for. So I hit the books and put some study in to find out if there are any facts or recent studies completed that I could base our decisions on, but I couldn’t find anything. Stuck for info I approached the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s librarians to find out if they had access to any data I could use. The answer was an apologetic no, even the CIM is stuck for this kind of knowledge.
But I can’t believe there haven’t been any studies on this, especially with telemarketing being such an established and profitable business. So, if you know anything on this subject, please share it here. For small businesses this would be invaluable in helping them to get the most from their budgets.
However, some good news on email marketing. Rosalind Gardner’s Net Profits Today blog has a post about the best day to send marketing messages via email. She concludes that it’s different depending on whether you are b2b or b2c. For b2b the preferred day for receiving email is Monday and for b2c it’s a Thursday. However for b2c, Saturday and Sunday are also both very good days.
In terms of response, email marketers have been achieving between 32-38% open rates and 4-5% click rates for both b2b and b2c. I.e. for every 100 emails sent, around 35 people will actually open the email and 4-5 will click on a link to visit your website. How many of those convert to sales is dependent on your product and site design. For more info on this data, cut and past the link below into your browser.
(http://www.netprofitstoday.com/
blog/index.php/archives/2006/10/13/
the-best-day-to-send-marketing-messages/)
In terms of telemarketing, we decided to test various times of the day to evaluate when our targets were most responsive. Based on the test, we would evaluate the overall likely success of the campaign, as well as the most successful time of day.
Tag:-
Recent Conversations
-
- Alchemist: I wasn’t impressed. This isn’t a matter of subliminal messaging at all....
- Jez Hunt: Segmentation is SUCH an important part of marketing today… and it’s...
- Commercial Real Estate Florida: Awesome video and very inspiring. Thanks for sharing!
- Rabbit Pearl: Great tip! Its very very interesting when you learn about that you can choose your...
- car insurance by state prices: Yes its very important to have up to date knowledge of your...
- Tereza: I heard some time ago about this book and most interesting part for me was his...
- Hosted PBX: Smartphones are the way to go. Offices using Blackberries have flexibility and...
- funny tshirts: thanks for this.. great opener to me about crowdsourcing. thanks again
-
Loading ...
-
Subscribe to this Blog
