Get Started

One of the centerpieces of Relevancy Marketing is to get started. Relevancy Marketing is designed to move a company, who by virtue of their place in the market, a lack of staff or a corporate culture that prevents it, from no, little or ineffective marketing into a long-term strategy of increasingly customer-centric relevant marketing communication.

Since these organizations lack the historical focus on this type of marketing, we can expect very little in the way of reliable customer data. This consequently leads to a lack of well developed knowledge of who the customer is for the purposes "database marketing".

As a result, the first step of any relevancy marketing campaign is to do a mailing. This may seem contradictory, but I submit that continued complacency is worse. The concept goes like this:

Quickly collect a list of all current and past customers, prospects, chamber of commerce lists, vertical market members, etc. This list may seem next very low quality and it is, but we are going to use it to collect data. Have the list NCOA'd, that is updated to reflect change of address orders, cleaned, and duplicate entries eliminated.

The mail-piece should be a 4-1/4 x 6 postcard, with very generic information on it (but including a phone number). This card is the mail equivalent to a 12-second "elevator speech": we are, we do. This card should be mailed at a first class postage rate, which, when presorted equals or is less than mailing the same piece at bulk rates. It also acomplishes something else that is very important. You will also get the cards with any remaining bad addresses back at no charge. You have begun to collect data!

The trick is not to get hung up on anything. If the list universe is over-thought, or the message over-thought, you will stay right where you are- doing nothing. Just get something out.

This mailing accomplishes four critical things:

1. we are starting,
2. we should generate some leads,
3. we will end up with a very clean mailing list,
4. we have begun to develop momentum.

While that mailing is being prepared and mailed, the next step begins: the collection of anecdotal data.