Introduction
The purpose of this course is to help you conduct a direct marketing campaign using well proven rules. For our purposes, we are defining direct marketing as:
- Direct Mail
- Telephone Selling
- Selling via the worldwide web.
Each of these methods puts you directly in contact with the customer without involving a third party. You can use just one of the methods shown above or you can co-ordinate them as part of an overall sales campaign.
Let’s have a look at each of these methods starting with Direct Mail.
Your Direct Mail Campaign
If you have been enthused by the advantages of direct mail mentioned in the previous section, you probably can’t wait to get your first mail shot in the post. Don’t do it! At least, not yet. Great campaigns need a great deal of planning. Great disasters begin with an absence of it.
Consider the following dreadful scenario. Suppose you rushed into a campaign with little research on the content and sent the mail shot to the first address list that came to hand. You could end up spending all your money for absolutely no benefit! You have simply poured a lot of good money down the drain!
In order to do direct marketing effectively, you have to get a number of things right. Here is the list.
- Decide What You are Trying to Do
- How Much Should I Spend?
- Reaching Your Target Customers
- Decide What Package to Send Them
- Decide Who is to Handle Print, Production and Mailing
- Decide who will handle the Response
- Review
Let’s look at each of the points in more detail.
Decide What You are Trying to Do
This sounds obvious but, if you look back to the previous section, you will see that direct mail can be used in a variety of ways. It can be used to contact new customers, sell directly to old ones, introduce new products, get appointments for salesmen etc.
It is important to be crystal clear what you are trying to achieve. This is because your mail shot has only a few seconds in the customer’ s hands whilst the customer decides whether to act on it or throw it away. Your message must be spot on otherwise your mail shot will go into the bin.
If you know precisely what you are trying to achieve, you will be able to decide:
- which mailing list you should use
- the shape and size of your ‘package’
- the style in which is it written
- the amount you need to spend etc.
Throughout the campaign, you need to have a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve. Provided you can answer this key question, you can make rational decisions on all of the following activities.
How Much Should I Spend?
All business expenditure has to be justified and the marketing budget is no exception. Deciding the budget can be like the chicken and the egg. Until you know what the campaign comprises, you can’t work out the costs. But, until you know how much is allocated, you can’t decide the extent of the campaign. Obviously some guesswork is needed. Why don't you take a sheet of paper and put your first rough guesses in place? You will have to return to this cost estimate many times as the figures become clearer.
Whatever happens, the financial benefits of the exercise must outweigh the costs.
Reaching Your Target Customers
It’s obvious, isn't’t it? Talking to the wrong people wastes your time and money. So, the accuracy of your targeting is the single most powerful influence on the success of your direct marketing campaign. You must identify your target customer.
Before you spend any money, why not spend some time and effort on customer research?
The easiest people to sell to are those who have already bought your product or service. Provided they have been well treated, they will trust you and respond again. You may already have their names and addresses available from:
- sales records
- guarantee cards
- delivery addresses.
You could also have customer lists based on previous sales efforts like:
- sales representatives’ call sheets
- trade shows
- direct response advertising
- telephone enquiries
- competition entrants
etc.
If you have a computerised accounts system and access to spreadsheet and word processing software, you can create an in-house list which is a powerful way of reaching your best sales prospects.
We will return to target customers and how to reach them later.
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Decide What Package to Send Them
The next stage is to put together the package that will be sent to the customer. Normally this comprises:
- a letter
- an envelope.
- a means for the customer to reply
- any other inserts, e.g. a brochure.
If you are going to compose the package yourself, why not take a large cardboard box and throw into it the ‘junk mail’ that you can collect. That way, when you come to compose your own package, you will have a whole boxful of ideas from which you can draw inspiration!
Decide Who is to Handle Print, Production and Mailing
At its simplest, your mail shot may consist of a couple of hundred personalized letters produced from your own list, using your own laser printer.
From these simple beginnings, you could progress to a mail shot often of thousands of packages including letters, brochures, samples, reply cards etc.
You do not, of course, have to do everything yourself. Direct Mail agencies will handle all or part of the job for you. If you do subcontract the work, you must have a clear idea of what you want them to do on your behalf. If you don’t brief them properly, they may not have enough guidance to achieve the results that you hoped for.
Items you will have to address are:
- the production of the letter
- sourcing the correct size envelopes
- design and print any brochures you may need
- design and print any reply card you may use
- addressing the envelope
- stuffing the contents into the envelopes
- mailing the contents.
All of these activities add up to a considerable amount of work. Moreover, the design and print times may take a good deal longer than you originally allowed. There is a natural law which says that jobs like this also cost more than you originally planned!
This is where good planning pays off. If you have to hit a particularly critical mailing date, start at that date and work backwards to discover the latest date at which each activity must commence.
Why not talk to a Royal Mail representative to see if you can make use of any special deals which may be in operation at the time you want to commence your mailing.
Don’t forget that if you want to get your replies sent back to you by freepost, you will also have to allow time to get the card layout designed and approved. You will also need to set up an account with the Post Office so they can bill you for postage on the replies sent back by your customers.
You should draw up a timetable marked up for each activity in your Direct Mail Action Plan. This will highlight areas where timing is critical.
Be careful when you approve artwork sent back either by the designer or by the printer. Once you have signed the artwork as satisfactory, you will have to pay for a re-run should there be any mistakes which you have failed to spot.
Decide who will handle the Response
Although replies from direct mail are traditionally low - less than 1 0% - you still need to handle the responses on a timely basis. There isn't’t much point in spending months of your time and thousands of pounds of your money only to ignore the responses when they arrive. Be sure you have enough manpower, stock, samples or sales persons’ time to capitalize on the responses you do get.
If you intend to handle the responses using your normal level of staff, you will need to phase the mail shot so that all the responses don’t arrive on the same day. If this isn't’t possible, you could take on temporary staff to deal with the routine aspects of the work. Alternatively, you could pass the entire job of responding to customers to a fulfillment house who will be expert at dispatching goods to customers.
Keeping customers hanging about will generate a very poor image of your business. Moreover, if you don’t catch them while they are 'hot’, you may not be able to catch them at all.
Don’t forget that most customers will be looking for some sort of response which is probably made of paper. Printing lead times can be lengthy at certain times of the year. If you find that there is a problem with design, approval, unusual paper stocks, cardboard boxes, samples etc, you could find that the whole initiative collapses because you failed to plan the response properly. Get your suppliers on your side; tell them in advance of your plans.
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Review
Lord Leverhulme once said that half the money he spent on advertising was wasted, but he didn’t know which half. .
He would have if he had been doing direct mail.
Direct mail’s effectiveness can be measured. And you must. Then you can start to analyze what made it effective, and what didn't’t. From that, you can improve your
results.
If your response rate rises from 1 % to 3 %, it’s probably not due to heavenly intervention. It’s due to earthly improvement - yours. So, when you’ve stopped applauding yourself, find out what caused it and do some more!
At the outset, you set targets for the direct mail campaign. Did you meet those targets? Whether you did or you didn’t, you now have a database of people who responded to your mail shot.
. Were they the kind of people you anticipated would reply?
. Did they come from the areas where you thought they would?
. Did they differ in age, sex, nationality, profession etc from what you thought?
Can you call a few of them on the telephone to see what they liked about the offer and what they disliked?
Did you have the right list - were many of the letters returned as ‘gone away’?
You can now regard this first mailing as your ‘control’. If you do a further mailing, you will want to alter the single item which you thought was most ‘wrong’ about the previous mailing. If you only alter one item at a time, you will be more certain which item had an effect. If you alter two items, you won’t know which caused the change in response.
Benefits of the Worldwide Web
In many ways, selling on the internet is very much like direct mail.
. In both cases, you deal directly with the customer.
. In both cases, you have only a limited amount of time to make an impact on the customer. In the case of direct mail, your letter may be thrown in the bin. In the case of the internet, the ‘surfer’ will click to the next internet site.
. In both cases, you are using a communication medium to reach your customer. In the case of direct mail, it is by post; in the case of internet, it is by telephone.
Because of these similarities, most of the lessons in the direct mail part of this full course apply to the worldwide web, e.g.:
- clearly define your target customers
- clearly identify the features and benefits of your product or service
- present your product or service to the customers in a way which attracts attention, interests the prospect, stimulates desire and prompts action.
The internet has additional benefits when compared to direct mail.
Advantages of the Worldwide Web
It can be cheaper. The cost of developing an internet site has fallen recently.
Programming and design skills are widely available and the software is powerful.
This makes website development quick and easy.
. The cost of running an internet site is modest - in some cases, the Internet Service
Provider (ISP) offers the use of the site free.
. E-mail provides a quick, cheap and powerful method of communicating with
customers.
. Once established, the internet site keeps working. You don’t have to continually
mail shot customers to maintain contact.
. . . .
. Payment by credit card is now accepted practice. This means you can convert an
interested prospect into a sale in minutes.
. Many internet surfers have money and are prepared to spend it on items which
attract their interest.
. Search engines provide a quick and efficient way of steering interested customers to your website.
. The internet is open 24 hours a day and it reaches all parts of the world.
. You can develop your website to give it wide customer appeal. Of course, you can make sales but you can also offer advice, amend your product catalogue, publish operating instructions, update product specifications, modify prices and enhance public relations.
. The internet means you can set up and run your business with the lowest possible overheads. If you wanted to run a normal shop, you would need property, staff, heating and lighting, rates etc. An internet ‘shop’ enables you to trade without any of these commitments.
The internet has been an unprecedented success in business. You can see website addresses printed on adverts, stationery, shop fronts, advertising gifts etc. The worldwide web is now an integral part of business life all over the world.
Increase your earnings! Take the full course and receive nationally recognised qualification or call us free at 08000-75-8000 for further information |
