Deliver magazine's article "Follow The Reader" describes how St. Louis Magazine used postal mailing lists of former subscribers as their primary method for increasing circulation. (This article is on page 20 of Deliver's April 2010 issue.)
In the article, St. Louis Magazine circulation manager Dede Dierkes explains 3 reasons why she likes direct mail as a marketing method:
1. "Direct mail is a good way to reach a large group of people and show them what they've been missing."
2. "With mailings we'll be able to do more testing...we can see what's working and what's not throughout the year and make changes as we go along."
3. "With direct mail, recipients can open a piece at home on their time, see what they're getting and make a decision to respond."
St. Louis Magazine is using 4 direct marketing strategies which every marketer can easily adapt for their business:
1. More frequent, smaller mailings to house list, especially to expired subscribers.
2. Test new and different lists instead of relying on the same lists used for years.
3. More mailings to the most responsive zipcodes.
4. Use postal mailing lists to drive people online to subscribe.
1. Less clutter in the mailbox = more response for your mailings.
Here are 6 more reasons, per Rod Devar, Manager of Direct Mail at the US Postal Service. Rod's article "Don't Call It a Comeback" appeared in the December 2009 issue of Deliver Magazine.
2. Mail will be even easier to track with new postal services like Intelligent Mail.
3.. Clean lists are eco-friendly and cost-effective.
4. Content marketing is on the rise, which brings more opportunites to cross-promote.
5. Newspapers are suffering, which means that advertisers need to find new ways to reach prospective local customers.
6. Printing and database technology continues to improve, which provides more opportunities to use color and personalization in your mailings.
7. Direct mail is a strong acquisition tool with better targeting than other methods.
Here are the best ideas to improve email marketing results in 2010, as per a recent article in
Direct Magazine called "
Better Late Than Never: New Year's Resolutions for Email Marketers".
1. Spend more time choosing subject lines, and continually test new lines and phrases. The success of your email marketing is completely dependent upon subject lines which compel readers to open your message.
2. Rethink the concept of a mailing list. Marketers shouldn't look at their email list as a static grouping of names, but rather as a community that wants to interact with you -- and with each other.
3. Add social media links into your email messages so that recipients can share with their contacts in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
4. Focus on sending more targeted emailings, not just more emailings. Work to capture more data at all steps of the customer relationship so that you can segment your lists by demographics, and can send triggered messaging based on customer purchases or other behavior.
5. Make sure that you can prove to the ISPs that you're delivering timely, targeted, and relevant messages to your email list.
6. Design your email message templates so they can be read on cell phones and other mobile devices. This is especially true for those who market to consumers and on-the-go business professionals. For a growing percentage of us, our mobile device is always on and with us. Which means there's a good chance of creating action with highly relevant, timely, mobile-enabled email offers.
7. Limit the number of emailings to inactive segments of your email list to just once or twice per year. Make sure that you have a system for deleting inactive email addresses from your email lists.
Earlier this week the GroundHippo surfaced again. Unlike other prickly predictors such as Punxsutawney Phil and Buckeye Chuck, the GroundHippo forecasts business climate.
Speaking in his native French, GroundHippo said "Les bonnes choses arriver à ceux qui les recherchent!"
Which translates to "Good things happen to those that seek them!"
I agree. In my work as mailing list broker I see lots of pent-up demand producing good results for those clients who are actively using postal and email lists; and for those marketers who are aggressively sending promotional emails to their customers and prospects.
One of my favorite aspects of direct marketing is that you can repeat the results to your best performing lists. Just like Bill Murray's character in the movie "Groundhog Day", once you've identifed your core group of successful lists, you can mail again and again to the same lists and expect similar results.
Target Marketing magazine's recent article "
4 Reasons Why Direct Mail Can Thrive in the Social Media Age" gives insight from leading direct marketing experts regarding how direct mail can be successful instead of, or as complement to, new media such as email, social media, mobile messaging, and other types of online marketing. The key points:
1. Many marketers are finding that their response rates are climbing again because their prospective customers are simply receiving less postal mail. Less competition in the mailbox can mean more orders for direct marketers.
2. Postal lists offer a much greater universe size and much better ability to target the most desirable segments than any other medium. Marketers and their list brokers can apply the business intelligence gathered from their postal mailings to emailings and other internet marketing strategies.
3. Marketers need to focus on the strengths of each channels. Think of marketing channels as tools in a toolbox, and use direct mail for customer acquisition, email for customer retention, and social media for customer relationship management CRM.
4. Online marketing methods struggle to produce results for in some market segments. The main reasons:
a. Customer prefers print rather than online communications.
b. Overuse of email lists by some marketers.
c. Cell phones and service plans in North America inhibit the effectiveness of mobile marketing as a business tool.
In an article called "
Legendary Marketers Share Secrets to Outlasting the Downturn", Deliver Magazine asked why direct mail is an effective tool during difficult economic times. Here are excerpts of the best answers:
From Martin Edelston of Boardroom Inc. and Bottom Line Publishing...
* If you can't afford to do things on a large scale, do them incrementally. In the process of putting together a mail campaign, I saw that the list for a major business publication was a good one for our purposes, but I never could afford to take a big hunk of it. So, instead, I mailed every week to 25,000 names, and we worked our way through the list.
* If you're testing your lists, your copy and your mailers, you can manage these programs very precisely and only mail to the best parts of the list where you know you can make money.
* Adding new customers is the name of the game. I do anything I can to avoid being stagnant by testing to see what's working and extend our reach.
From Charles D. Morgan of Acxiom...
* There's a lot less competition in the mail, and that's even truer now that people are cutting their spending. So, if you are in the mail and all your competitors aren't, a lot more of your stuff is going to be opened and acted on.
From Thomas J. "Tim" Litle of Litle & Co...
* Integrate all kinds of marketing techniques, including email lists and internet advertising. Direct mail will survive in that mix, but you have to learn how to make multichannel marketing work by trying different combinations. If you stick to just one medium and don't use other channels that are appropriate for your business, it's going to be hard to survive.
The ecommerce marketing magazine
eM+C published an article recently called "
Secrets to Acquiring More Email Subscribers".
The article summarizes a presentation by veteran copywriter and direct marketing strategist Arthur Middleton Hughes. The top tips as suggested by Mr. Hughes are:
1. Find out how much revenue your average email subscriber generates for your company each year. Then use this number to get management approval and funding to acquire more email subscribers.
2. Use email list subscriber lifetime value to create your email names acquisition plan and email list marketing budget.
3. Be creative with tactics used to acquire new email names. Some of the best suggestions include:
* Prominently feature your email list registration link throughout your website, and as part of all social media marketing on the internet.
* Explain the benefits of subscribing to your email list.
* Reward your employees and customers for gathering email addresses for your use.
To see all of the email list creation tactics, read the eM+C article at
http://www.emarketingandcommerce.com/story/3-steps-acquiring-more-email-subscribers
1. Continue sending direct mail offers to your list and rented lists from other companies. See recent article from
Direct Magazine called "
How to Find New Names and Keep Your List Fresh" for more ideas.
2. Select a professional list manager. In the past few years, dozens of publishers -- even those with very large direct mailing lists -- have determined that it's much more profitable for them to "outsource" their list management. A list manager is constantly networking with mailers and list brokers as a true "sales advocate" for your list. But you, as the list owner, retain full ownership of list and complete control over who gets access to your list.
In exchange for a small percentage of sales, you let someone else take care of all the administrative chores: billing, shipping, contact with brokers and mailers, updating your list, promoting your list, and keeping track of your "exchange" balances. This frees your staff to do what only your company does best.
3. Make sure that your list manager adds ZIP+4 to all records on your list, plus performs NCOA processing and CASS certification. Many large-volume mailers are now renting (or paying for) only those names that are 100% "barcodable."
4. Ask for job titles on your order forms in print and on your website. Make sure that your customer service, data entry, and all marketing personnel understand the critical importance of capturing your customers' email address, complete name, job title, business name, and address information.
5. All mailings to your own list should include "address correction requested" endorsement under your return address.
6. Update your list with new buyers and address changes as frequently as possible, on either a monthly or quarterly basis.
7. Include response information such as "recency of activity" and/or "what was purchased" for each name on your list. This makes your list usable by roughly twice as many mailers.
Email lists are the most coveted source of mailing lists for many marketers. But the manner in which an email list was created can have a major impact on the results achieved from the list. The smart marketing manager and list broker must consider the three different types of email lists when making his or her list selections.
Type #1: Response Lists
These are email addresses of people who bought something online or via traditional direct mail; and supplied their email address and permission to receive promotional email messages.
Type #2: Website Visitors Lists
Most of the largest email lists contain people who have registered with a web site or subscribed to a free online information service. These people have given their permission to receive email and are thus "opt-in" names. However, these people haven't necessarily spent money to purchase anything from the email list owner.
Type #3: Compiled Lists
These lists come from data overlays, membership directories, or other forms of compilation. These lists are typically not "opt-in" and don't have any type of online response history.
Warning Re Low-Cost Unlimited Use Email Lists:
Beware of anyone who offers to sell you an email list for your unlimited use. I've heard horror stories re poor list quality and blacklisting from marketers who bought low-cost, web-gathered email addresses. Which is why my company works only with rented opt-in email lists from publishers, catalogs, associations and trusted compilers.
A recent article by
Seth Godin called "
The unclicking 84%" caused me to think about how much direct mail and email marketing is focused on non-buyers.
Here's a sobering reality of direct response marketing:
The vast majority of people who receive your postal mailing or email message either won't read it, or don't care what you have to say.
If we look at direct marketing metrics from the perspective of non-response, you'll see that an average of 80% or more of recipients will not open and read your email message; and more than 95% of the people on any rented mailing list will not respond to your offer.
To succeed in the direct marketing business, you must craft your sales messages with appeals to only the 5% to 20% of recipients who are interested in your product or service now. Everyone else is just clutter.