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.

Structure of a Mailing List

In my job I deal with mailer created lists and databases on a daily basis. Some are better that others, but almost all could be structured better. Since data is one of the cornerstones of Relevancy Marketing, I thought I'd take a minute to discuss how it should be structured. I am only addressing the mailing list portion of the data here. Any additional data can be structured as required.

An address consists of several elements:

• Addressee or Contact
• Firm (Company or Organization)
• Address
• Suite, Floor or Apartment
• City
• State
• Zip or Postal Code
• Country

There is only one address line. So your data should contain only one address line. You may in fact have two or three on your data, but only one is the mailing address. The problem is that in your data, it may be spread across three fields. This type of data structure greatly increases the chances that the address will be washed out of the list during the zip+4 encoding, or become UAA (undeliverable as addresses) during mailing. Let's look at what an address might look like:

Chuck Lafean
PO Box 665
123 Court St.
Floor 2
Auburn, MA 09210

What I have here is actually two addresses, a mailing address and a physical address. If this is run through CASS sofftware (coding accuracy support system, this is a USPS term, describing confirming an address is deliverable and appending a delivery point barcode), both addresses are probably good. Great, right? No, the physical address 123 Court St. may not have a mail receptacle, and if it does, floor 2 may not. The correct mailing address in this case is:

Chuck Lafean
PO Box 665
Auburn, MA 09210

Here is a basic template for a simple mailings list: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pG1NFxLqU5zi5m9gi7U-xZw. Simply copy and paste the header into a blank spreadsheet.

Data Storage

At this point in the process, you are just storing data. The structure of the data is very fluid at this point. That is you really don't know what you are going to end up storing- the number of fields, what the fields are going to contain, etc. For this reason, I recommend using Excel or some other spreadsheet program.

A spreadsheet is ideal at this point because it is very forgiving and adaptable, and adjustments can be made rapidly. With a database, it is necessary to know what you are going to need to store from the very beginning. I'm sure someone will disagree with that statement, and I would admit that yes, database programs can be adapted after creation. However, I have yet to find one that automatically updates across a schema when adjustments are made. If you have one, go ahead and use it, but just remember, you are now the database administrator- do you really have the time for that at this point?

Another primary advantage to using a spreadsheet is that virtually everyone can operate the program. Even if they have never used the program before, they can be quickly taught how to enter data.

While ultimately you might want to create a relational database structure, that is not necessary now. A spreadsheet is easy to break up into parent and child tables at any point in the future and even on an ad-hoc basis.

Additionally, Excel provides easy access to ad-hoc queries and even cross-tabs (I realize this is perhaps overly technical, if you don't know what I mean by these terms, that's ok, don't worry about it.)

In short, Excel provides all the power you need future, and the simplicity and speed you need now.

A note to geeks:

It may seem like you would want a more robust database program to collect this data, and eventually you might. But unless you are already well versed in that program, taking time to learn is a momentum killer at this point. Now is time for action, not steep learning curves. Hiring the development out is not any better. First of all you can't even design the schema of the database yet so paying someone to develop the database is a waste of money; money that should be spent communicating and collecting additional data. Second, database development can be pretty time consuming, and at this point in the process you don't have the time.

Excel allows for rapid collection of data in a very free form way and with very little training. This is exactly what is needed at this point.