When considering direct mail or email marketing, pretty much the first thing you should figure out is who your target audience is, or to put it another way:  To whom is your message relevant?  Being relevant to your prospects will mean the difference between throwing money down the drain, and generating new sales.  If your message is not relevant to its recipients, its just a wasted effort. 

 

I’d like to explain what I mean by way of a real situation that happened to me.  Like many homeowners these days, I would like to refinance my home with today’s extraordinarily low interest rates.  My current mortgage holder, like many today, needs to generate cash flow in order to compensate for all the bad loans on their books that are losing money.  In an effort to generate some cash, my mortgage holder has been sending me a direct mail offer every month for the last 10 months proposing to refinance my home loan at a lower interest rate. 

 

So far, it sounds like a great fit for direct mail.  I want what they have to offer, so their message should be relevant to me, and it is, but there is more to great direct marketing than just message relevance.  Some marketers might stop there and say that I was a great potential prospect, but as you will see, the last 10 months of direct mail have been a wasted effort and actually cost the mortgage company money and resources.

 

After 10 months of receiving direct mail offers , I finally called the mortgage company (there is a lesson there too: sustained direct mail efforts work!), they pulled up their data and told me that I didn’t qualify for their offer.  Sometimes a company may not know if a lead is qualified or not, but in this case, they did know.  Imagine how many unqualified leads, like me, had received their direct mail offer and were now eating up their call center resources with no benefit to the company. 

 

What’s even worse is that this wasted effort took time away from their sales reps being able to focus on qualified leads.  When I first called the lender, they told me that they would have to call me back because the volume of calls was so large that no one had time to speak with me.  It took them 5 days to call me back!  That’s a lot of man-hours spent filtering prospects, which could have been done on the front-end by a computer.  Undoubtedly, at least some qualified prospects didn’t wait the 5 days for a call-back and probably got their needs met by another vendor.  Clearly, this was potentially a very costly mistake.

 

The problem with this situation is that although the marketer made sure they were relevant to me, they didn’t check to see if I was relevant to them.  They correctly identified me as someone who wanted their product, but didn’t verify that I was someone with whom they wanted to do business.  The degree to which leads can be pre-qualified varies depending on the circumstances, but in this case, they had all the data they needed to see if I qualified for their program.  Checking their data could have saved them (and me) a lot of time and effort.

 

Work smarter, not harder.  Make sure your offer is relevant to your prospects, and make sure your prospects are relevant to you.