10 Ways To Joggle...
Has your direct marketing program overstayed its welcome? Is it time for something new, something different, something that will lift response rates and increase profitability? If you let a campaign go on too long without changing it, customers may start to "glaze over" when they see that old familiar package arrive in the mail.
Greg Harpur, vice president of marketing for the $50 million apparel cataloger Appleseed, said in a recent issue of Catalog Age magazine that "mailbox glut" is of critical concern. "We as an industry have to justify each and every piece of mail we send," he said. "We have to understand the ramifications of mailing the same offer to the same people over and over again."
What can you do to shake an old campaign up and get new and exciting results? Here are ten ways to get started:
Become Your Own Customer
Take an objective look at your own program. Pretend you are a first-time customer and know nothing about this company. Look at your creative and give it a grade. Is it customer-oriented? Take a fresh look at any photographs or illustrations. Do you show real people using your product? Are you using call-outs or captions to demonstrate how the product works? Does the artwork illustrate a particular point or evoke a certain mood?
Examine your current offer and make a list of new offers to test. Make sure your offers really add value from the customer’s point of view. I recently had a client who was selling a $50 product with an offer of a $5 gift certificate at a major department store. That is not much of an incentive -- what can you buy these days for $5.00? On the other hand, I received a mailing from Loehmann’s last week -- I am a good customer of theirs -- with a gift certificate worth $25 off any purchase I made during the month of December. Now that’s an irresistible offer. I’ll go to the store and spend much more than the $25 they gave me!
Check out your order form. It should be a stand-alone advertisement. It should reinforce the offer and be just as much a selling tool as your letter, brochure, catalog, or any other piece of your direct mail package. An effective order form is involving – you might want to include a peel-off sticker or a box where customers can check off "YES! I want to order from you!" An order form should be easy to use and designed with enough space for customers to fill in their full names and credit card numbers, along with their e-mail address and phone number.
Look at your shipping and handling charges. Do they seem to be too high? If so, you might want to test free shipping and handling, and see if you increase response rates. And what about tax charges -- do customers have to figure out the taxes themselves? Is there anything else on the order form that might stop customers from making a purchase? I saw one recently that asked me to check a box if they could replace the item I was ordering with a similar one if necessary. It made me think I might not get what I really wanted, and stopped me from placing my order.
Make an actual purchase from your company. Call your 800 number and evaluate your telephone service representatives. Are they pleasant, friendly, accommodating? Did they take the opportunity to notify you of any special offers? If they didn’t represent your company the way you’d like, take a trip out to the telemarketing firm and provide a training session. You might want to send the operators samples of your products so they can describe accurately.
Finally, order some merchandise and inspect it when it arrives. Did the package arrive intact? How did it look? (Companies like Gateway Computers have built their brand by putting their recognizable design on the shipping carton. Perhaps you could do the same.) What was included inside the package -- any bounce back offers or special discounts? Was there anything about the package that would discourage you from ordering from this company again? Was there anything that would excite you about ordering again?
Be honest in your evaluations of all the facets of your business. It may turn out that you don’t need to change your whole direct marketing campaign; perhaps you would do better by redesigning your fulfillment package or revising your telemarketing scripts.
Become Your Competitors’ Customer
Send away for every catalog, brochure and direct mail package that your competitor(s) are offering. You’ll be amazed at what you discover by studying a whole category of mailers at once. I recently did this with vitamins. We had been asked to revitalize a vitamin mailing, so we looked at several catalogs out there. Most of them contained no benefit copy -- they simply listed the available vitamins without any explanation of what they could do for me. By looking at those catalogs, it was easy to see how we could make our client’s catalog stand out from the competition.
Your competition can come up with good ideas, too. Of course, you’d never copy what someone else is doing, but you may discover some ideas that could help improve your mailing. For instance, if your competitor’s catalog uses a lot of diagrams with call-outs to show their products, it might mean that some of your products might need a little more explanation than you’re providing.
Increase Your Order Size
If your average purchase order is $35, try to increase it to $50. Make your customers a special offer -- for instance, if they spend at least $50 they get a free $10 calling card, or they can earn points toward an end-of-the-year dividend. What about those customers who buy the same $35 dollar item over and over again? One way to increase their orders would be to cross-sell them on another product.
Start Fresh with a Clean Slate
Many times, clients come to my office because they want to change their campaign. Yet, as soon as I start making suggestions, they start putting up barriers. The most common barrier of all is, "But this is the way we’ve always done it!" That may be a large part of your problem. One way to break through this barrier is to spend some time listening to your own customers.
This is a technique successfully used by Michael Dell of Dell Computers for years. He spends a half-hour every morning listening to customer calls. He listens when they tell operators about competitors’ products costs and quality. He listens when they call customer service with complaints. If there’s a problem, he’s the first one to fix it. Maybe that’s why Dell stock is on the rise again.
The idea is to be customer-focused. You’ll be much better off if you listen less to your uncles and your aunts and your assistants and your account people, and listen more to your customers. Come up with ways to break through your normal way of doing business. For years, the only way to a buy a book was through a book club or at a retail store -- until Amazon.com came along and opened a virtual bookstore on the Internet. People flock to this site because it’s easy. There are reviews of the books and jacket flap copy for you to read. You can order a book and in three days it’s at your home, hassle-free. It’s this kind of thinking, breaking out of the traditional mold, that leads to great success. If you’ve always offered products through a catalog, perhaps you could try offering one product in a simple brochure for a change, or test sending a postcard. If you’ve always advertised on TV, create and test an ad for a radio spot. The idea is to continually test new ideas; one of them is sure to produce a breakthrough in response.
Study Your Database for Opportunities
There is a gentleman I know who has a great interest in WWII and reads everything he can get his hands on about that subject. He used to belong to a military book club. Even though the only books and materials he ever bought from them were about WWII, he kept receiving offers about the Vietnam War. And more offers. And special discounts for him if he bought those books. Needless to say, he soon dropped out of the club.
Why didn’t anyone there notice who he was and what he was buying? In 1997, Catalog Age conducted a survey called the Benchmark Report on Critical Issues and Trends. They targeted consumer, business-to-business and "hybrid" companies (those who sell to both consumer and business). Half of the b-to-b respondents, 52% of the consumer respondents, and 57% of the hybrids declared the need to mail smarter as a primary concern. As an example, they cited the Magellan travel accessories catalog, which studied its database and sent a reactivation mailing to customers who hadn’t made a purchase within 24-36 months. The mailing offered free shipping on all purchases made with two months of receiving the catalog. The program lifted Magellan’s response rate by 2-3 percent.
But the survey also showed that only 12% of hybrids, 28% of b-to-bers and 29% of consumer respondents model their files. "What’s more," says Catalog Age, "only half of all respondents to the Lists and Databases survey even calculated the lifetime value of their customers."
Many marketers send their databases off to a computer service bureau and never look at them again. But most computer service bureaus can hook you up on-line to your own database. Take a Saturday afternoon when the phones aren’t ringing (and you don’t have a dozen other things to do) and study your customers’ patterns of buying. Then offer them things that fit into that pattern. Study the times of the year people are buying most. If you’ve always sent your catalog in December, but most of your customers buy in April, maybe you should send another catalog in the Spring. If someone at the military book club had taken the time to study their database and customer buying patterns, my friend would still be a customer.
Study Your Lists
Sometimes the best thing you can do to spruce up your lists is to go to a new broker for some fresh ideas. That’s what happened when I was working on the Ford campaign. We asked a new broker to come up with some creative ideas. He suggested that the people who buy Craftmatic beds might also be car buyers. Was he right! That list outpulled all the others we had put together!
Go to a new broker, tell him what you’re offering and to whom. Ask him if he can come up with something your old broker might have missed. This doesn’t mean you have to give up your old broker all together. It just means that sometimes it takes a fresh insight to come up with more than just "the usual suspects." And sometimes, two brokers are better than one!
Pushing Borderline Customers "Over the Edge"
It’s difficult to know what to do with borderline customers. Those are the people who are buying from you, but not enough to be really profitable. It might be a good idea to tell them that – nicely. For instance, you might send them a letter saying, "We appreciate the business you have given us in the past. However (paper and printing prices being on the rise), in order to keep you on our mailing list, we need to hear from you again. That’s why we’re giving you this special offer. Spend just $50 with us before December 31st, and we’ll send you a free thank-you gift."
Most of the time, your goal is to cut off unprofitable customers before you lose too much money on them. One company I know developed a negative option program with an offer of the first month’s products free. Customers were expected to pay for all following shipments. Their system was set up like this: the company shipped the first month’s products and required no payment. One month later, the second shipment was sent. It contained an invoice, which customers were required to pay within 30 days. Before those thirty days were past, the third month’s products were shipped. The company did not ship any more products unless payment was received – but in the meantime, some customers received three month’s worth of products without paying anything at all. The solution would be to move the second shipment forward so that the bill is paid before the third shipment is mailed. That way, customers still get their first shipment free and the company saves itself one month of unpaid merchandise.
Make Your Catalog Work Harder for You
If you’re offering products through a catalog, you have a perfect forum for reaching your customers in new and exciting ways. Your goal is to make the catalog a "keeper" – something the customer will not want to discard. One way to do this is to add editorial content to your catalog. Make it an entertaining, educational tool for your customers. If you’re selling plants and gardening supplies, for instance, you could include short articles on how to improve your green thumb, or special care instructions for specific plants. If you sell storage and organizational items, include tips from professionals on how to set up an efficient office in a small space. Some marketers shy away from this approach because they’re busy trying to figure out what the real estate is worth. But if you can intrigue customers enough to really read your catalog and keep it around longer, you give them many more opportunities to buy your products.
Another idea is to work with promotional partners. Just as two heads are better than one, two companies are often more powerful than one. If you sell children’s clothes, for example, you might try partnering with a toy company whose product you like and respect. Since you’re both going to the same demographics, you might as well test shared segments of your databases and maximize your marketing dollars.
Partnering is especially effective if you can pair up with a company that has an established name. It will provide you with an instant endorsement. For instance, if you could get a well-known and respected packaged goods company to offer your product on their box, the alliance would give you strong credibility.
Don’t Get Locked into Suppliers
For several years, I marketed a professional journal. They used a particular designer for every issue. The designer was good, but used the same basic format for every issue. After a while, the journal began to look dated. When I mentioned the subject of changing the design, the editors did not want to stop using their friend.
Making friends with your suppliers can be a very positive experience. Friends tend to go the extra mile for you and give you 110%. The down side is, it’s hard to criticize your friends. In the same way going to a new list broker may give you a fresh insight, changing suppliers may get your marketing out of the doldrums.
After 18 years with the same designer, the journal finally switched to someone new. The response rate rose by 1 ½%. More important, they received a lot of white mail from their subscribers saying how much they liked the new design.
Don’t Forget Your Customer Retention Strategies
No one can afford to let their current customers drop away. It costs too much to replace them. So as you improve your customer retention strategies, your revenue dollars will increase as well. Your goal is to make every experience your customer has with you a positive one – one that makes them value your attitude as much as your service.
In order to do that, you must know your customers. Treasure – and reward – the ones that are the most loyal. Even something as simple as a thank you note will let customers know they are appreciated and keep them coming back and spending more. What you’re doing is building relationships. There’s no better way to get you out of your direct marketing doldrums than to shore up sagging relationships. Keep the communications flowing with information, special offers, and maybe a surprise or two. Make your customers feel like part of your family.
Segment your list into multibuyers and high spenders. Make sure you treat these customers well. Mail to them more often, and give them special offers. Do the unexpected: send them a free gift, or a free product that they normally buy (i.e., if they consistently buy panty hose from you, send them a free pair). Their dollars will show you their thanks! Remember, it’s a brand new year – a perfect time to take a fresh look at your direct marketing efforts.
Copyright 2003 Mason & Geller Direct Marketing, LLC., All rights reserved.
