As an homage to the insightful book, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, I’m going to attempt to write a summary in haiku (Japanese poetry style consisting of three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables respectively) that summarizes the essence of mastering a changing environment. All right, here it goes:
Talk to certain “Few”
Make sure they find Stickiness
Listen for changes
What do you think? Do you have any haikus you’d like to share? Haiku Battle!
Nonprofits Still Successful with Direct Mail
via www.aim168realestate.com Sims and Rees provide simple, easy-to-follow instructions for writing a letter, choosing the best times to mail, and measuring results. The book also contains a chapter full of sample sentence starters for those who need extra help getting started writing. More than two dozen sample letters round out the book, giving readers a look at actual letters used successfully by organizations around the country.
Direct Mail Must Be More Direct Than Ever
via www.smbmarketingguide.com People don’t want to be sold – if they don’t know, like or trust you they can block your messages in a staggering amount of ways. So, what’s a small business that wants to target a very defined group of prospects to do? I mean, direct mail is still a viable tool for this kind of engagement, isn’t it?
When Donors Move from Online Donations to Direct- Mail Giving
via philanthropy.com Roger Craver, one of the conosultants, blogged about the results, prompting a reader put forth the theory that this donor “migration” from online to in-the-mail is a result of far better donor cultivation at the hands of seasoned direct-mail fund raisers. Mr. Belford distilled it this way: Direct-mail fund raisers know how to raise money; online “fund raising” is left to techies who don’t.
It’s not direct mail, it’s targeted mail : Media Sales Today
via www.mediasalestoday.com Bad news first: Direct mail spending dropped 3% in 2008. That equates to $56.7 billion. It’s the first recorded drop in 60 years for the U.S. Good news now: Mass mailings are a thing of the past. Smaller, targeted direct mail campaigns are a thing of the future. Marketers still want to use direct mail, just in a more effective way.
via www.theagitator.net We were going to write a shameless plug for direct fundraising maven Mal Warwick’s new book, but then we got this promotional message from Mal himself.
This is an interesting video, in that the point is raised that the most aesthetic design does not always return the best response rate (if your intent is to sell a product or service with your direct mail piece).
For smaller businesses, it’s absolutely necessary to test different designs to see which one works. Doing an A/B Test is an easy way to do this. Design two pieces with completely different approaches. Use different response mechanisms (phone or websites/URLs). And measure, measure, measure!
Watch the video, the ideas are not limited only to fitness facilities…
via thedirectmarketingvoice.com This post is mostly aimed at those “pure” social media experts, who claim that anything short of investing totally in social media is a backward and doomed approach. There’s been a bit of backlash against social media experts, and this is close to that spirit, but also hopefully constructive.
MediaPost Publications ‘Save Now’ Is the New ‘Buy Now” — And 6 More Recession-Messaging Ideas
via www.mediapost.com Last year, marketers seemed to be slow to change their messaging in response to the yet-to-be-formally-declared recession. During the holidays, retailers responded to slowing sales largely by promoting deep discounts in email after email. However, since the turn of the calendar, I’ve seen retailers adopting a variety of tactics to coax sales from their recession-wary customers:
YouTube – If B2B marketing emails could talk
via www.youtube.com – a skit on classic mistakes made by B2B email newsletters: failure to deliver value, use of no-reply addresses, poor targeting, failed personalization, etc…
Why are online donors migrating to direct mail?
via blog.masterworks.com A theory for the migration of online donors to direct mail. A couple days ago, I commented on The Agitator blog in response to a report about Target Analytics’ new Internet Giving Benchmarking Analysis. The report shows that “significant numbers of online acquired donors switch their giving channel to direct mail in the second year of giving.”
This post is mostly aimed at those “pure” social media experts, who claim that anything short of investing totally in social media is a backward and doomed approach. There’s been a bit of backlash against social media experts, and this is close to that spirit, but also hopefully constructive. My primary point is that social media is useless – unless integrated into a larger context and a larger media mix. Considering all the current hype about these new online tools, here are some stats you may find interesting:
I detail these points to give some perspective to the massive hype surrounding Twitter and Facebook. Yes, they are emerging tools for engaging with an audience, customers and contacts – but they do not yet have truly widespread reach. This may change in the coming years, but for now, the only marketing campaign that can come close to reaching 100% of your desired market or audience is an integrated campaign. It’s too bad that the main news media fails to put new social media platforms in a greater light.
This being said, you should think about cautiously adding social media to your current marketing mix, but just as it balances out against investments in print, radio, television, direct mail, and online ads. I would love to hear the term “integrated marketing” used more in common dialogue, which would mean more people are reading about integrated marketing and thinking about their strategy from the get-go. Maybe that will take time, or maybe we just have to make sure that conversation happens – at every event. If you’re unfamiliar with IMC, check out these two books: Kellogg on Integrated Marketing and IMC: Putting it all together.
How the stats were calculated:
2 to 3% of the world’s population was pulled from xyberlog
80% of US Citizens are not on Facebook: Facebook reports 175 million active users. Of those, more than 70% are outside the U.S., implying that less than 30% are inside the U.S. If we take 30% of 175 million, we have 52.5 million active U.S. Facebook users. Wikipedia has a figure of 306 million U.S. residents. Excluding the very young and very old, I estimate we can exclude about 15% of that total, leaving us with 260 million people. 52.5 million divided by 260 million people is about 20%. Only 20% of the U.S. Population uses Facebook (admittedly rough estimate).
70% of the U.S. population is reachable via Direct Mail- Taking a major consumer list provider’s public stats, about 210 million consumer mailing addresses are available. See the above wikipedia figure to determine percentage.
70% of the U.S. population is reachable via the most popular television shows. Nielsen reports 23.7 million viewers for American Idol.
73% of U.S. consumers ages 12+ heard one or more network radio commercials in the course of a week. Arbitron press release. Also, interestingly, if you advertised on all major stations in just the top 10 radio markets (metro areas), you’d reach 25.7% of all Americans.
