Talon Mailing &
Marketing, Inc.
561 Acorn Street, Deer Park, NY
11729
(631) 667-5500
Welcome to the Talon Mailing & Marketing October
Newsletter:
By Lee Marc Stein, President, LEE MARC STEIN, LTD.
Direct marketing can help virtually every type and size of
business today. But making it work is becoming more difficult as an increasing
number of businesses embrace it. How can you succeed in using direct marketing
to help your business. For starters, focus on these five keys to direct
marketing success.
BUILD ADVOCATES.
Advocates are your very best customers. They not only buy
from you very heavily, but sell for you by touting your product or service to
business colleagues, friends and neighbors.
The objective of any direct marketing effort is not just to
get a response or make a sale, it’s to build customers. Direct marketing can be
used at any stage in the customer continuum –
separating suspects from prospects, getting prospects to
trial, turning one time buyers into multiple buyers, and finally getting
multi-buyers to become advocates.
Not everyone will become an advocate. Direct marketing helps
you leverage the 80-20 rule (80% of your business will come from 20% of your
customers). It allows you to identify the 20%, reward them to retain them, and
then clone them.
SELECT THE RIGHT MEDIA
Direct mail is not always the right response medium to use,
nor is the Internet. It
depends entirely on the profile of your customers/prospects
and on the nature of your product.
For example, if you are marketing a truly broad-based
product, direct mail will probably not be the way to go. It is too expensive on
a per-thousand basis and takes too long to execute. Television will be probably
be a better route. Once you have created and produced the spot, the cost of
buying television is under $10 per thousand. About the best you can do with
direct mail is $250 per thousand.
For niche or micro-markets, however, television normally
isn’t the best route. For targeting, direct mail, the telephone and print
advertising work best. If you’re selling a product for boat owners, you could
rent any one of a number of lists, mail a package and then follow-up with a
phone call and/or you could place an ad in a boat-owner magazine.
It’s important to recognize that planning and buying media
for direct marketing purposes is much different than for general advertising.
The objectives are not the same, and fortunately the rates are not the same.
In those media exclusively used by direct marketers (mail
and telephone), working with someone who understands mailing lists is of the
utmost importance. Lists are responsible for 60-80% of the success of a
mailing, so using the wrong one can really hurt your chances of success.
MAKE THE RIGHT OFFER
An offer simply means what you’re willing to give and what you
want in exchange for a particular response from prospects or customers.
Included in the offer are price, terms, guarantees, and extras. The right offer
doesn’t necessarily mean the one that generates the most responses or the one
that generates the highest profitability from the individual effort; the right
offer is the one that ultimately contributes the most to your business.
Offers are normally categorized by the objective of the
direct marketing effort – lead generation (for field sales or telephone
follow-up), traffic-building (to a retail location, trade show booth, or Web
site) or direct sell to business or consumer markets.
In lead generation, the decision is how hard or soft the offer should be. The harder the offer, the fewer, but more qualified the responses. Hard offers generally will ask prospects for considerably more information about themselves and their buying intentions, ask for an appointment or demonstration, mention the cost of the product or service, and refrain from offering any type of gift or premium.
Traffic-building offers normally involve premiums, special
discounts or exclusives. As an example of the last category, upscale women’s
apparel stores use a private or preview sale effectively in place of a premium
or discount.
In direct-sell situations, free trials, samples, premiums
and discounts can all work to draw attention to your promotion and to boost
response. And despite their recent bad press, sweepstakes, if handled
correctly, can work in your favor. You need not offer $10 million (or even $10
thousand in some circumstances) to increase your response. Whenever possible,
offer a guarantee.
Certain offers will help you move customers from being
one-time buyers to advocates. Loyalty programs deserve consideration from almost
every marketer. Then, depending on your product or service, you can consider
offers like automatic shipment, membership clubs, and continuity programs.
CREATE DIRECT RESPONSE ADVERTISING THAT GETS RESPONSE AND BUILDS A RELATIONSHIP
You need to break through all the communications clutter in
the marketplace. Now comes the hard part: the breakthrough must be done in a
way that’s credible and keeping with your product or service.
Example: You can put a photo of a cute baby on the envelope
of a direct mail package to get it opened. But if you’re selling
steaks-by-mail, you have to tie the product to the baby or you will have
attracted attention without paying it off for the reader.
The keys to creating good direct response advertising are
understanding the prospect’s beliefs and coming up with a strategy to change
those beliefs in your favor. The strategy must be based on a differential
advantage (a benefit your prospect wants and can’t get elsewhere) and your
ability to communicate it.
Good direct response advertising involves the prospect. In
direct mail, personalization, tokens and rub-offs, stamps, and quizzes all aid
involvement. Good direct response advertising also makes it as convenient as
possible for a prospect or customer to respond. Use as many vehicles as
possible: 800#s, prepaid reply envelopes, fax numbers, e-mail.
Make sure your advertising unit supports the creative
strategy and message. For example, if you’re trying to get the top _ percent of
the population to consider buying luxury vacation homes from you, don’t merely
send out a flyer offset on cheap paper. Conversely, there are many situations
in which 1/3 page ads in magazines will bring in as many responses as full page
ads.
ANALYZE RESPONSE TO IMPROVE PROFITABILITY
One of direct marketing’s great assets is that it is
exquisitely measurable.
The ultimate measurement is lifetime value of a customer.
This means how much profit a customer contributes over a period of time (usually
five years) after the cost of goods and services and promotional expenses.
There are a number of ways to improve lifetime value (other than lowering
product/service costs): lowering customer acquisition costs, increasing
frequency or duration of purchase, and increasing size of purchase.
Being able to measure means being able to improve. But the
only way to improve is to test on a continuous basis. The critical factors to
test are –
The media you use. Will print advertising bring in new
customers more cheaply than direct mail? Will they be better customers? Which
lists pull the best response? Are they the lists also producing the most
advocates at the end of five years?
The offers you make. Increasing your shipping and handling
charge by $1.00 could substantially increase profits because it has no effect
on upfront response. Offering a 30-day free trial could substantially increase
the number of people who respond to your advertising… BUT… if your product
isn’t good, the trial could have a negative effect on profitability.
The creative approaches you take. What strategy best
separates you from your competitors? Should you say it with different words,
fewer words and more pictures?
Your timing. What months are best for you? What’s the ideal
time between efforts particular prospect and customer groups? How many times
should you communicate with a prospect group before you give up?
Key coding and tracking your efforts become as important as
anything else you do.
LEE MARC STEIN is President of Lee Marc Stein, Ltd., a
Hauppauge, Long Island-based direct marketing consulting & creative
services firm. He can be reached at
(631) 724-3765 or by e-mail lmstein@earthlink.net.
© 2002 Lee Marc Stein, Ltd. www.leemarcstein.com
Did you know Talon offers the following services? Click on the links below to see samples.
·
HP High Quality
Inkjet (near laser quality)
·
Data Entry (from
100 to 100,000 names and addresses)
·
Polybag and
shrinkwrap services
·
Merge/Purge
services with comprehensive reports that can instantly be retrieved from the
internet
New Clients:
Talon would like to welcome the following new clients this
month to our growing roster of clients:
Mailing
Clients:
·
J. Walter Thompson (one of the top 5 largest
advertising agencies in the world).
New Mailing Lists Housed at Talon
(we house over 450 mailing lists)
·
Catalog Age (and 90 other lists from Primedia Publishing)
·
National Underwriter Company
Mike’s Favorite Links:
Here are some links you probably are not aware of:
Yankee
Playoff Tickets Giveaway:
We are giving away two tickets to a Yankees playoff game. To win be the first caller (please call, don’t hit reply or email me). Call Michael Borkan at 631-667-5500 x 303. If I am unavailable the first voice mail requesting the ticket at x 303 wins!
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know
by email: mb@talonmm.com
To learn more about our company, please visit our web site: www.talonmm.com or contact Michael Borkan at
(631) 667-5500 x 303.