wednesday, february 3rd, 2010
POSTAL consultant PUTS FOCUS ON RELEVANCY
By Bill Roberts
What is the one concept any direct marketer needs to stay focused on while creating a campaign?
"Relevancy," said Sherry Francisco, certified direct mail consultant for the United States Postal Service. "All anybody's trying to do is reach the customer with a relevant message – at the right time, to the right person."
We live in a media-saturated world, she told the Feb. 3 luncheon meeting of the Mid-America Direct Marketing Association, and each of us receives some 4,000 media images a day. We filter out the few messages that are relevant (there's that word again!) to our own lives.
As marketers we need to decide not only what to say but also which medium to use – or better, which medium our customers are using. Their choices include everything from TV and radio to e-mail to social media and Internet banner ads to bus benches.
"Your customers are everywhere all at once," Francisco said. "So where are you?"
She had some answers to that question from a recent Direct Marketing Association survey of marketers about their integrated marketing campaigns.
Marketers responding to the DMA survey (there were 574 usable responses to the 25-question survey) reported that they touched their customers an average of 3.6 times through direct response TV and radio, 2.6 times through e-mail, 2.0 times through direct mail and 1.7 times through mobile texting, she reported.
Direct mail – naturally relevant to a USPS consultant – scored highest as the medium bringing in the highest percentage of revenue from integrated-media campaigns, she said.
"Direct mail drives the most revenue, but it is more expensive," she reported, adding that other mediums scored higher in return on investment.
"Direct mail is most used to lead off a campaign," she said, adding that the medium most often used for the second "touch" was e-mail. Most marketers scheduled a time gap of around two weeks between "touches" of an integrated campaign, she said.
Surveys have value, she said, but urged marketers to remember a saying by Einstein: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
Francisco observed that many marketers today use social media like Facebook and Twitter in their marketing without adequately understanding them and probably without getting a justifiable return on their investment. In years past, marketers similarly ran ads in the Yellow Pages, she said – just because it was the current fad.
She praised print catalogs – still popular, despite predictions that the Internet would render them obsolete – as a great way for marketers to build loyalty in their customers.
Mobile devices like Blackberries and iPhones erode customer loyalty, she said: "It's just way too easy to flip around somewhere else and find the same thing cheaper, and they offer free shipping."