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 marketing
Irritating Marketing
I read a piece from the Direct Marketing International journal recently that summarised a survey from Pitney Bowes about the forms of marketing found most irritating by consumers. You probably won’t be too surprised to hear that automated telesales won the top prize. I’m sure everyone agrees with me in that the second you hear that automated voice on the phone the only course of action is to hang up.
However there must be some people who respond to automated calls, otherwise marketers wouldn’t be putting money into these campaigns. As such, please, if you have spent money on an automated telesales campaign and it’s generated results for you, get in touch. I’d be delighted to hear your views on the subject and to tell everyone about your success story!
The survey also found that live telesales and spam emails were the second and third most irritating forms of marketing. There seems to be a pattern here with direct marketing receiving a bit of a bashing in the survey. However David Jefferies from Pitney Bowes seems to think that direct marketing is a good tactic, but that companies need to talk to their customers properly:
The message here is clear: spend time and effort on data collection and analysis, and build sophisticated customer profiles
In other words, if you are going to use direct marketing tactics, make sure you target the correct people with the correct message. Or, don’t use a shotgun approach, but a sniper rifle with your communications. This makes sense when you think about it, especially as consumer groups become more segmented by niche needs and wants. Better to run several campaigns with highly targeted messaging, than one campaign trying to reach out to too many people at once.
A little bit of research on Pitney Bowes seems to show they run regular surveys, so keep your eyes peeled on them for more interesting marketing insights!
22/9 Update
I have to share the comment from Daniel Penton who linked to the following hilarious YouTube clip. Anyone who hates telesales will love this (sorry if it causes offence to anyone)..
Tag:Some Recent Conversations
It’s been a while since my last post, which in fact was even written by guest blogger Mark Nagurski. But in this time there have been some really interesting comments and conversations on the blog and I wanted to highlight some of these and share some thoughts..
On ‘The Offline Google‘ there’s been plenty of talk around what are the key elements for SEO and pretty much everyone agreed on the imporatnce of:
- original content
- backlinks
However, whilst the post generated some interesting comments on SEO, what Mark was really talking about was taking the concepts of SEO to your offline business. His ideas are very credible, I particularly like the point about targeting niche customer segments:
be specific, address your customer needs, and find a niche where there’s less competition
Very similar indeed to targeting your blogging to niche market segments.
The results from June’s reader poll sparked a few comments around which is the best direct sales tactic for generating new business. By far most people voted for face to face over direct mail, email or telesales. The poll is actually still open in the right hand sidebar if you want to vote.
For my money, the best replies were from those who talked about a mixed approach, for example telesales to set appointments for face to face meetings as mentioned by ‘Mortgage Broker‘. However as Eric rightly points out, getting face to face isn’t always that easy.
There’s a saying amongst marketers that it takes seven touch points with a customer before you can reach a sale, could you use telesales, email, direct mail and face to face as four of those touch points..?
Sally Whittle’s PR advice was also well received. Thanks for all the comments on there and for those who bookmarked this and Sally’s site. If you haven’t read her tips yet I suggest you head there ASAP, some ideal ideas for small businesses!
The Nintendo viral video seemed to confuse most of you. Is it a viral or not, is the remake another viral, is Nintendo behind all of this? All questions still to be answered, but certainly there are a lot of you out there who are cynical about this one.
Any guidance Nintendo?
For those who don’t understand what viral marketing is all about, check out the definitions at Wikipedia, Search CRM.com or Marketing Terms.com
In response to the post about video enriching your blog, it seems an awful lot of you agree. I certainly hope to be introducing more video to this blog to add more humour, make the content more digestible, making the blog more interactive and more.
Thanks to everyone who has commented on the blog over the past couple of months. I’m certainly hoping to reach the next 1000 comments by the end of August, so please do drop me a note and join the conversation.
Tag:Controversial Advertising Makes Waves
Here is the recent Mr T advert for Snickers that was cancelled by Mars as it was deemed to include anti-gay references. It seems to me that by ensuring the advert was cancelled, it has actually generated more coverage, made the video viral and probably enabled it to create a bigger splash.
You can vote for yourself in the comments as to whether you think it is offensive or anti gay…
Tag:Advertising-
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