Use Relevancy Marketing to Mail LESS!

One of the important benefits of increasing the relevance of your marketing communications is the ability to communicate less and get equal or better results. By communicate less, I mean:

• Communicate with fewer recipients, and
• Tell them less.

Increasing relevance properly improves response rates to the point where you can
communicate with far fewer individuals and still maintain the number of quality leads, or increase them if you wish. This allows you to send out far fewer communications and save money, or if you can accommodate the increase, the same number for more responses, dramatically increasing return on investment.

Additionally, you can communicate with less information. This allows you to maybe change your communication format; mail a postcard instead of a letter, for example. This is less costly to produce and mail, if formatted correctly. This will save you money- resulting in an increase in ROI.

When Relevancy Marketing is coupled with a personalized URL response vehicle, you can save money on the responses as well. More importantly, you can rapidly fulfill more information requests in real time on-demand. This allows you to save the expensive (to both produce and mail) catalogs, etc., for the truly interested.

The other benefit to this kind of marketing mentality, is the save the environment benefit. Communicating less saves trees and requires less power. And if you use 100% post-consumer recycled paper to print your postcards, it's even better. We use a 100% pc recycled paper that is made with wind power!

What do your think?

BE CAREFUL WHO you Listen to!! They May Not Get It!

The delay in posting has been the result of putting a proposal together for a major contract. The buying influence at our prospect has repeatedly admonished us to "bring our 'A-game', we are up against the best!"

Part of my task was to research the competition. What I found was very interesting.

Here I am researching companies that claim to be the biggest, the best and the most advanced in one to one marketing, and in each case, "one to one" was simple personalization. This is even more interesting when you consider that the recipients comprise several distinct segments, all of whom would benefit from a tailored message, and the "sender", whose bio was required, was different in each mailing. These mailings are to retirees; a very diverse group ranging in age from 55 to 85. A 55 year old individual has a completely different view of someone who is 85. This needs to be leveraged. But here are these giants of the industry, providing personalization.

The moral of the story is this: you may think you are talking to an expert in one-to-one marketing, but y0u may not be. Don't let them tell you that one-to-one is cost prohibitive. It's not. Of course, there are instances when it isn't appropriate and you certainly should use it just because you can. See my post on the Relevancy Continuum for how I feel about this.

To quote (well maybe paraphrase) Zig Ziglar: "To sell to John Brown, put yourself in John Brown's shoes." If your message would be more effective utilizing relevant communications, use relevant communications.

Any thots?

TRACK EVERYTHING!! The Key to Long-term Success.

Marketing communications generally serve four purposes: they

• sell something;
• ask for something;
• provide information;
• build brand.

Strategic Relevancy Marketing creates a fifth purpose: to gather information. In the absence of ample data about your recipient, you can use Relevancy Marketing to gather it.

There is a sage piece of sales advice I always tried to follow when I was in sales; "ABC; Always be closing." In marketing communications you should be prepared to always be testing. Track everything, and track it on the recipient level as well as the project level. Tracking on the recipient level provides information about the recipient. Of course, this will only work if you are communicating in a campaign, not a one-off basis. What is the recipient responding to? Is it a postcard or a newsletter? Is it an offer for an up sell, or something new? Are they asking for free information, and what is it about?

You have to create your communications with asking these things in mind. If, you send out a newsletter, some of the primary articles may require going to your website for more information. And if you do that, you probably want to require a password (specific to the recipient) to get it. You could also do this with a microsite and email delivery of the content. If you are communicating with a smaller group, you may want them to call, then, write down who called and what they wanted. Track everything.

After a few months of communicating and tracking, you will begin to have data that is very useful. Some recipients may not respond at all, downgrade them to a quarterly postcard just to stay in touch (or drop them altogether). Those recipients that respond the most frequently, get more specific offers, and may telephone follow-up. You have their attention, and more importantly, they trust you, you have credibility with them. You might even have enough information to do a kind of RFM analysis (recency, frequency, monetary).

So whatever you do, always be testing. And, always be gathering info. TRACK EVERYTHING!

Sell MORE!! Use Relevance.

Creating relevance for the recipient of your marketing communications requires good data. I'm stating the obvious. Relevance takes the form of images, text, layouts, etc. But really, there is another form of relevance involved.

Relevance should also take the form of the offer. While we can use relevance to create interest and credibility, when we are selling something, we use relevance to offer a product or service that has value to the recipient. In other words, while it is possible to sell ice cubes to Eskimos, wouldn't you rather sell them blankets or boots. You can sell your ice cubes to your recipients in Arizona. (There is less sales resistance, lowering costs, and more demand, meaning you can improve profitability.) Relevance allows you message to do this. And, if you couple your data with variable data publishing and digital printing technologies, you can change your message and your offer on the fly.

At this point, you can use the same "mailing" to up sell, cross-sell or simply sell to prospects. There are efficiencies to be had by marketing this way. More importantly, by fine-tuning the customer/prospect mix of your "mailing", you can achieve your optimum balance between customer retention and customer acquisition.

Just remember, as you begin to homogenize your data, that data is the hinge-pin of Relevancy Marketing. If you are not prepared to engage in the kind of marketing I outlined above, you may be in the future, so keep your data pure. This can pay huge dividends.

The Platinum Rule

Many people is small business operate according to the Golden Rule; they treat every customer according to the way they want to be treated. Relevancy Marketing empowers an organization to operate according to the Platinum Rule: "Treat every customer according to the way they want to be treated."

In the past, I worked for a business that was big into CRM. It was a sales and service company serving the business community. A hand-written thank you card went out after every sale. The new owner visited every customer at least once a year. They stayed up day after day to bake cookies at Christmas and the 4th of July that were expensively packaged and then hand delivered. A follow up call was made after every service call. And some customers though it was great! Some laughed at it, though. And some distrusted it! This was clearly a case of operating by the Golden Rule instead of the Platinum Rule.

Virtually all CRM programs can accommodate collecting the information required to operate your business by the Platinum Rule. Surveying your client base will give you virtually all the information you need to understand how the individual wants to be treated. Or, if you operate in a business to business environment, how the client company wants to be treated.

Though the Platinum Rule is focused on the CRM or customer retention side of Relevancy Marketing, it can easily be employed in a customer acquisition mode as well. By consolidating the responses of your current clients, you can develop a fairly accurate picture of how most of your customers want to be treated. Could this be the Silver Rule: "Treat my prospects according to the way the majority of my customers want to be treated."

You may find that knowing how your customers want to be treated can revolutionize the way your company presents itself to the world. You might want to ditch the automated attendant. You might want to invest in a more useful website. You will likely decide to change the frequency and format of your marketing communications.

direct+marketing marketing one+to+one+marketing relevancy+marketing customer+acquisition customer+retention

So, Now What Do I Do?

Back to our client with "too much data".

Once the data is homogenized, cleaned and segmented, we can look to creative and copy. Since our goal is to make marketing communication as relevant as possible to our recipient (and I would add valuable), we need to begin to tailor our message to our recipient constituencies. In the case of our client, they serve both the residential furniture and the corporate/institutional markets.

Depending on the level of segmentation and the amount of data available, these segments should be further segmented. I would imagine that they serve high middle class individual to the wealthy. From a creative standpoint, images for each of these segments could be different. The same would hold true for male versus female and married versus single- each of these segments will find relevance in different images. Copy should be different as well.

With the institutional recipients, there are additional segments: corporate boardroom and executive as well as libraries and schools. Again, each segment has different needs and budgets, and therefore, creative and copy should reflect that. Further segmentation and tailoring of the messgae could be has around size of the company (Fortune 100 v. Fortune 1000, or public v. private, for example), as again needs and budget may be different.

Setting this kind of communication up, requires a greater investment than just just producing a catalog. However, if we follow the process out, the ROI is there. The need to produce a larger catalog, with many pages that don't apply to me as the recipient is in essence, eliminated. We don't have to buy printing enough for the year and then store the catalog, hoping that they don't become stale. When we fulfill a catalog request, we are mailing a smaller item, providing potentially huge postal savings. We can also fulfill on demand, and so are not tempted to batch fulfillment to save postage and processing fees. We are responding to our prospect at the time of highest interest, and remembering that timing is the largest lever of relevancy, with the content and time of greatest relevance, producing a much higher potential for a sale, and indeed a higher potential for a larger order and repeat orders. We can further increase relevance by personalizing the catalog; perhaps a letter on the inside of the from cover addressed to the recipient or past client endorsements from the recipients gender, marital status or income band. Let me reiterate that using the data should be very subtle. Many people have a visceral reaction to the perception that their privacy has been violated!

When you combine enough data and digital printing, the ability to provide extremely timely, highly relevant marketing communication is limited only by your imagination.

How Do I Handle all this Data?

I work for a small mail house in the U.S. that is rapidly evolving into an integrated marketing company. This involves building new processes and creating new technologies (at least the way we are going about it does).

Yesterday, one of the partners came in an told me that we have a client who is struggling with their data. They apparently have 16 or so different databases, with different structures and different purposes. The question was, how do I handle all this data? Asked a different way, the question is, "How do I compile this data in a way that allows me to generate relevancy for my prospects and clients?"

Obviously, this is a two pronged problem, first is the data itself. Second, is the messaging.

The first step we will take is to homogenize the data. This means that we will change its data structure to allow us to combine it. Simply put, we will name the fields the same, add an id field and a field for "list" and then combine the data. As I said in a recent post, this will be done in a spreadsheet because it is the most flexible tool for this kind of work. We will need to include every field in the source data, because this will ultimately be used in the segmentation process.

The next step is to cleanse the data. This involves making sure that the mailing address is in the mailing address field and that the address is current and up-to-date. It will likely involve NCOAing the list and should include formalizing the names.

Once the data is combined and clean- we need to look at the need to segment. I propose that all the fields in the source data can be consolidated down to maybe four or five. (I haven't seen this data yet, but I understand it is pretty rich.) Before we can segment the list, we need to have an understanding of what the marketer is attempting to do with the data and what segments they think they serve. We also should be aware of the need to augment their list with purchased data, so building data around list readily available data elements. This may require data enhancement services, that is sending the list out to have available information appended to our database.

Depending on how prolific the company is with their mailing activity, we may be able to do some modeling. Neural Network modeling attaches significance to independent variables and allows for very precise profiling of the actual customer. So, the database needs to collect as much information as possible, preferably from every prospect and customer touchpoint. This may require (and probably should be designed as) relational data structures. My recommendation is "When in doubt, keep the info." I like to refer to myself as a kook (keeper of odd knowledge) when it comes to managing a database. Keep it all- you can always set what you don't need aside.

As we go down this road with this company, I will add real world experience to the probablys and shoulds of this post.

I will cover the messaging issue in another post.