Direct mail campaigns now are vastly different from the days of huge mailings that were sent to every known address in a zip code.  Advances in the printing industry along with new technologies, have streamlined the direct mail process, making it easy to present each targeted recipient with a unique and highly relevant message.

Innovative digital technologies now make it possible to pinpoint specific prospects based on demographics, launch direct mail touches based on event triggers, and capture real-time response metrics in order to determine immediate ROI. Unique codes, mobile technology and new quick response codes have changed the way direct mail is being used.

Check out our latest video, Smart Direct Marketing, that demonstrates how technology and direct mail can be combined to provide marketers with near instant campaign ROI — putting agencies in a great position to track campaigns and gain  more access to client marketing dollars.

“So rather than complain about the rising cost, power mail users should do what others do when the price of any resource rises—figure out how to use it more efficiently. Businesses have to get smarter. And many uses of today’s mail simply aren’t smart.”

Both as a marketer and a consumer, I couldn’t agree more.

Marketers need to take advantage of new tools, technologies and methodologies to deliver smarter, faster, and measurable direct mail. By doing so marketers can save money, get the data and ROI they want while consumers get what they want—relevant mail that addresses their needs and interests.

Here are some technologies marketers can integrate with direct mail in order to bring efficiency and improved ROI to marketing campaigns.

Extreme Personalization:

Nothing captures attention and motivates response like relevant, timely and personalized direct marketing communications. Advances in database integration, variable data printing and event triggers allow marketers to deliver a truly unique experience for each consumer. And when done properly, it’s more than likely they’ll experience a much improved response rate and boost in ROI.

Read my reaction to a personalized direct mail postcard that I received after a shopping experience. I can still remember it like yesterday…

QR Codes:

Eliminate the gap between customer response and delivery of coupons, product information, special offers, or other marketing follow-up communications. QR (quick response) codes are two-dimensional, square barcodes that can store large amounts of unique data and, when scanned, can launch specific actions. They not only allow consumers to immediately access coupons, landing pages, product information or other data directly from their mobile device; QR codes enable marketers to collect data on consumer activity and track the effectiveness of marketing elements in real time.

Mobile SMS Text Marketing:

Motivate immediate response, collect real-time consumer data, and facilitate two-way communication by incorporating SMS marketing elements on direct mail pieces. Consumers may use mobile text marketing to initiate a survey, provide feedback, access customer service and support, receive promotional offers or redeem customer loyalty rewards. Marketers benefit through real-time response metrics in addition to capturing mobile phone numbers and other information to enhance consumer data sets.

Personalized Landing Pages (PURLs) and Unique Access Codes:

Personalized URLs allow consumers to access landing pages which contain information unique to them; a tactic that’s proven to drive response. Unique codes printed on direct mail pieces may be used to deliver more information, rewards, coupons and special offers to consumers via the PURL. Visits to PURLs and use of unique codes are highly trackable and can provide marketers with real-time metrics as well as a way to enrich consumer data sets.

An Integrated, Multi-Channel Marketing Approach:

By blending sophisticated marketing technologies with traditional and emerging channels, marketers have the opportunity to track campaign elements, collect valuable lead data and generate ROI metrics—all of which empower them to make strategic decisions toward achieving campaign goals. This also provides the consumer with information they want via their preferred channel and allows them to engage in more meaningful ways.

These are just a few technologies that are helping marketers use direct mail in more efficient and effective ways. Incorporating them into direct mail campaigns help to motivate consumer response and provide real-time metrics at the individual level. This, in turn, allows marketers to A/B test creative, cleanse lists and get smarter with direct mail.

If you send only 1 Ad / Impression, then Give Away the Farm

First off,  most marketing campaigns require more than 1 touch. (If you haven’t heard the term “touch”, touch = impression = ad; but it can also be a phone call or other interaction.)  In fact, marketing campaigns require multiple touches over time to a given customer before they’re ready to buy – just think of any relationship you’ve made in the past – you’re more likely to buy from someone who you’ve had multiple interactions with, than someone you’ve met for the first time (given that choice).  The only exceptions to this marketing rule, are in those cases where a product or service is incredibly cheap or incredibly scarce.  In terms of offers, think $10 round-trip airfare specials  or a seller with an experimental iPhone not available to the public…. you get the picture.

Most of Us Like Balanced Offers

However these extreme types of offers are the exception, not the rule. Most marketing campaigns balance an offer with a description of marketing features/benefits.  Consequently, both your brand (if you have a new/unknown brand) and your specific offer needs time for consumers to recognize the brand, then hone in on your exact message.

Many clients ask – how many times do I send out my mailing / advertisement?  This question is relevant across marketing disciplines, whether you use TV, Radio, Direct Mail or any other outbound method.  I get the sense that most people are looking for a definitive number – an absolute truth in marketing that they can rely on, to do the marketing for them.  It’s good then that people step up to the plate:  some advertising students say 5 impressions is required,   Creative Directors say 8 impressions, and others say 27 times.  I’m glad they step up with these firm numbers, as I am not sure I would ever float a definitive number, because it really depends on all the demographic and psychological factors that go into a specific brand & offer  being marketed to a specific audience.  Even the proponents of the renowned professor John Philip Jones who asserts that in the end, a single ad impression can influence a buyer, have to consider the observable, historical fact, that “enough concentration of media weight” must be placed to that buyer, for it to cross the necessary threshold with her for a purchase decision.  So for many campaigns, this means that one impression won’t cut it.

O.M.G. – Is this going to be a drain on my marketing budget?

Most companies see ROI fairly quickly if they know how to approach their campaign.  Instead of asking “How many times do I send out this ad?”, it might be better to ask “How many minimum touches do I need to send in order to start seeing returns?”  This takes into account all the factors that I mentioned above.  Your ROI trendline will probably look more like a bell curve anyway, so expect that there will be a ramp up period and a period of ongoing positive returns that will make up for the startup cost of branding your impressions on a given audience.  Just make sure you send out your ads for repeated impressions.

Your 5th Ad should not be a Clone of your 1st Ad

I cannot tell you how many times companies take it for granted that they have designed the best possible piece  – and never consider improving it as they go along.  Do research on how to do A/B Testing  (sometimes called Split Testing). The same audience demographic should be getting two different versions of your ad.  Pay close attention which performs better.  Typically you need a large mailing to prove statistically which one wins, but even if you do two small mailings side by side – if you get zero responses from one and 7 from the other, I think you can feel secure to judge a winner.  (Caveat: there may not always be a winner).  The point is that you are increasing the effectiveness of your ad in measurable ways, and by the 6th, 7th, or 8th impression your piece will have matured enough to make the appropriate impact with your prospect.

As a closing thought to the number of times one should advertise – in most cases if your campaign is a direct order campaign, and you can link positive ROI from one of your “Nth” mailings, then watch that ROI percentage closely.   That metric will tell you better than any marketing veteran when to stop advertising.   If you’ve sent out your 20th mailing and there is still positive ROI from the marketing campaign, then ask yourself – is there any reason to stop?

We need to stop embracing the latest variable or dashboard VU meter and demand a better, bigger, more thoughtful perspective on how to measure the ways marketing outreach meshes with consumer needs and expectations.

His statement confirmed my direction on the true goals of my upcoming campaign – to capture relevant market data, giving me a clear picture of the challenges that my prospective clients are facing, creating a relationship with said prospects based on their terms and needs, and adding them as a new customer by selling them a direct marketing solution that works…well, for THEM.

We too often get caught up in tracking numbers – hits, clicks, usage – and forget the main reason we are in business: to truly understand the client and customer challenges, needs and business goals by asking key questions; thereby increasing sales.

Imagine if you had data on an individual, not just a name and address, but what they are challenged with in their businesses (for BtoB). Your direct mail and email campaigns would take on a new light. They’d be personalized and relevant.

Ultimately, we should all develop better technologies, products and services that meet those relevant needs and see an increase in repeat sales — a metric worth tracking.

There’s an interesting consensus as society settles into

understanding what a personalized experience means.  It means we’re creating a “world” (i.e. consumer experience) that’s tailored to you.

In the online ad space, one marketing agency, Q Interactive , conducted a study regarding online ads that were served up based on behavioral data:

Women’s Channel, an agency that researches online trends among females, reported that 65 percent of its participants were intrigued by the system of behavioral marketing. They were especially interested in how the ads seemed to “know” what they wanted. A sizeable number of them — 88 percent — said that they wanted more tailored ads served online.  (imediaconnection.com)

This study is relevant to offline marketing in that it focuses on the question of “how did you like the experience” – when it comes to personalizing an experience for a recipient / web user.  The women who were part of this survey found, on the whole, that advertising that is tailored to them as an individual, creates a better experience.  It implies that the marketer has done the legwork necessary to intelligently recommend a product, instead of past approaches of simply yelling out a feature or benefit to anyone within earshot (or on a mailing list… or on a webpage…).

To some extent the personalization and relevance that some websites have (think facebook’s recommendations or personalized homepages like alltop) have shown us how useful this technology can be – and now offline technology like PURLs and demographic selects will translate a similar experience through the mail.   True this is but one study, but I think if you focus on the ad experience, we’ll find it to be a better world when even your dinner menu arrives personalized.

In order to address what some consumers believe is “greenwashing” (the practice of falsely portraying a product as green), every industry from Autos to Retail Food depends on third party organizations to provide credence to a company’s claims of environmental responsibility.  Our company achieved chain-of-custody certification from the Forest Stewardship Council to provide some transparency to how we print and use paper.  There are alot of aspects to this accreditation, from their website :

The intent of the FSC system is to shift the market to eliminate habitat destruction, water pollution, displacement of indigenous peoples and violence against people and wildlife that often accompanies logging. Just like other forest products, in order to use the FSC logo as an “environmental claim” on paper, the product must have flowed through the FSC “chain-of-custody” from the FSC-certified forest, to a paper manufacturer, merchant, and finally printer who have FSC chain-of-custody certification.

FSC is probably the largest of the independent certifications that one can get with regard to printed paper products. However, there are other organizations like the Sustainable Forestry Initiative with a long list of conservation supporters that endorse timber and paper companies like the one we use.  These organizations exist to provide both transparency and a source of information to consumers, so why not help educate by mentioning that chain-of-custody responsibility which passes on to your brand (if you use a provider that is certified).

Besides the marketing benefit of mentioning this in a message – think about what this really means – that we can know we’re doing the right thing to both live in society and manage it sustainably.

Fit Pregnancy's renewal cover

Now I realize that with almost every other magazine out there, that this wrapper is pretty typical marketing tactic to spur renewals… But think about it for a minute.  Your reader was pregnant 12 months ago. That’s why she ordered your magazine – but at this point it’s highly unlikely she’s still pregnant.  I know that my wife is not currently pregnant – and if FitPregnancy knows before I do … well, I will need to start a whole other rant – and probably not on this blog

From a marketing perspective, it would make better sense to put this in some context.  I researched FitPregnancy’s owner – American Media, Inc. and it seems that they own a wide variety of magazines, including 3 other magazine titles aimed toward health-consicous women, including Shape and Muscle & Fitness Hers.  So why couldn’t FitPregnancy cross promote those titles in addition to this renewal call-to-action?

If you stop and back up a moment, this is relevant both from a direct marketing perspective for those with magazines they’re steering but also for the rest of us who aren’t in the magazine game.  How unique is your product that perhaps the typical ways of marketing oneself needs to change depending on who you are?  Or a better question – what is the end experience that your prospect / customer receives?  Do you have the tracking (qualitative and quantitative) that would tell you the moments that your audience has disconnects with your marketing message?  Have you invested in people on your marketing team that are “listening” to what your audience is saying?

Companies that are both tuned into what their customers are thinking and saying AND have that feedback loop that enable them to translate those things into tweaks to future marketing touches will mean greater customer engagement and loyalty long term.  If you aren’t willing to go the “listening” route, then you better be really good at knowing the moment your customers start “expecting” again…

I say “limited” above because (1) its only truly “free” for your first 20 emails per day, and (2) their email tracking is still handicapped by all of the same pitfalls as all of the other tracking services, which include:

• If the recipient’s images are turned off, then none of the tracking will work at all.
• The number of forwards/opens/unique-opens is inaccurate if multiple users are behind a corporate firewall and all have the same outward-facing IP address.
• The metrics about browsers and operating systems requires that the recipient be using a web-based email service like hotmail, yahoo, or gmail.
• Cookies are used to track some metrics, which don’t work in most email clients that are not web-based.
• You are dependent on their network for the tracking, and if they experience a network failure, the tracking will not occur during the outage.
• Cannot truly track if an email is “read” or not.
• Cannot determine if an email was delivered to the inbox, the spam folder, the trash bin, or quarantined in a spam-filtering system.

In short, this system has all the same Achilles heels as most of the other email tracking solutions, but since this one is free, it’s a pretty good value.  I point out the limitations only because people who may not be so tech-savvy may not understand the current limitations of technology.  The current trend in online marketing is to rely heavily on these kinds of metrics, so just be sure you know what’s really happening.

With the rapid introduction of mobile applications (like BUMP and DUB) which foster the digital exchange of contact information, are traditional business cards on the verge of becoming obsolete?

I recently came across a few articles that challenged the relevance of printed cards in the age of virtual business cards, online networking sites and mobile applications that make it so easy to exchange information.

Those arguing against the traditional printed business card format made some great points:

1. Platforms like LinkedIn allow users to access a more robust profile that may include a description of the contact’s skill set, past affiliations, links to other social networking sites and websites, etc. in addition to basic contact information.
2. Many digital applications allow users to instantly sync collected contact information across platforms and programs, i.e. – on smartphones, in CRM systems, within email contacts, social sites, etc.
3. Utilizing digital applications to store and manage data makes it easier to update contact information over time. In many cases, changes that contacts make to their own information will be shared with anyone that has access to the contact’s profile.

Here’s what they failed to consider:

1. Currently, there is no standard that is shared across the various mobile applications and platforms available. So, how one app organizes data may differ from another, making it a bit more cumbersome to digitally exchange information.
2. Not everybody uses mobile or digital applications for exchanging business cards or sharing contact information.
3. Business cards are great for leaving behind, for one or for many.
4. Physical business cards give an individual and/or business the opportunity to express their style and provide insight to their thought process. As Daria Steigman pointed out in her blog on the subject, “The paper, logo, design, and readability give me clues to a company’s personality and whether they have thought about that first impression.”
5. Artists, photographers, design agencies, architects, etc. can feature visual elements on business cards that will help to better tell their story and differentiate them from competitors. To my knowledge, many digital applications do not allow the user to include photos or visual examples of work when exchanging contact information.

Business cards and the exchange of contact information will continue to evolve as more digital applications become available. However, there’s a fat chance that they’ll ever go away for good.

PS – Just for fun, read how Hugh MacLeod made a name for himself by drawing cartoons on the back of business cards.

• As an industry, the amount spent on direct mail will rise by $1.1 billion this coming year (to $45.5 billion)
• 2009 will mark the fifth year in which direct marketing has captured more than half of all advertising spend nationwide

To be clear, I’m not arguing that there are not rates of increased use of the newer marketing vehicles (commercial email,  online advertising and social media) – certainly marketers everywhere are finding the best ways to use these mediums.  What is happening is that firms, small and large, are realizing the effectiveness and special role direct marketing has in a firm’s overall marketing efforts.  When asking ourselves the question “Why is direct marketing spending increasing?” there are a couple of main drivers that come into play (and because of time constraints, I’m going to quote the latest Wall Street Journal article about direct mail mostly for anecdotal evidence):

Emotional Appeal

This is probably the most important aspect, and it’s hard to quantify the impact of emotion. In the book, “How We Decide”, Jonah Lehner outlines the massive importance of emotions in any decision making process (and for us that means the buying process), and direct marketing often uses emotion as a way to build trust and a relationship with clients.  A fun example from the WSJ:

To save money, Peter Taffae, founder of ExecutivePerils, a Los Angeles wholesale insurance broker, stopped his small firm’s humorous [movie themed] postcard mailings last year.  …

“We would visit some clients and notice they were hanging the postcards on the wall, collecting them,” says Mr. Taffae, who says he secured $270,000 from a new client who chose to do business with the firm in late 2008 after receiving the postcards.  “After two or three months [of no postcards], we got a lot of emails and phone calls asking us, ‘Did you take me off your list?’” says Mr. Taffae, who restarted the postcard mailings in November.

ExecutivePerils is a stand-out company in that they use the medium effectively to entertain their clients, and by doing so increases clients’ emotional attachment to the company.  Successful direct marketing often uses this as a call out – and when it comes across in a physical medium that people can hold in their hands , it ends up being a higher value piece, so much so that people may start collecting them and sharing them with friends.  It’s true that emails have the “forward to a friend” feature designed into them, however with direct mail that friend will not get a barrage of emails thereafter.  So in that sense it creates a sense of ultra-private information sharing.

The Exclusivity of Postal Mail

A few years ago it was easy to make the case that a business should start emailing their customers because of the low cost of email – and the fact that not many businesses were taking advantage of commerical email.  Now, as every business uses email in some form or another, the volume of email that people receive has diminished the effectiveness of one particular email from one particular company.  Here’s a relevant anecdote:

William Kapas, president of J.C. Kapas Real Estate Co. in Rochelle Park, N.J., says he has secured clients as a result of his high-gloss, four-color monthly mailings that list who has bought or sold restaurant properties though the firm.

“Our clients look forward to knowing, and it’s a little bit of gossip, too,” says Mr. Kapas, who exclusively uses traditional mail to reach clients. “I think it’s easier to delete the electronic junk mail without taking a second look.”

Mr. Kapas spends about $1 a piece for the monthly mailings, sent to about 2,200 current and prospective customers.

Email will always be a component of how you communicate to customers.  However, brands have to consider *when* to send an email.  For certain communication, especially loyalty, relationship & acquisition customer campaigns, email isn’t necessarily the best option.

Targeting a Message for Relevance

Personalization (including a recipient’s name or identity somehow) on a message is just one way of creating relevance.  Equally important aspects are creating the marketing list in the first place.  Demographics, customer profiles, customer segments will always apply differently to  different companies.  It was refreshing to hear this reiterated by Kellogg’s professor of marketing – again from the WSJ:

Many entrepreneurs find that the boiler-plate methods of the past—such as purchasing mailing lists and sending fliers or coupons to a mass audience—often aren’t cost-effective. Instead, business owners are creating personalized mailings, which may include special offers or other valuable information, and sending them to a hand-picked list of current and prospective customers. The idea is to send something that’s more appealing than “junk” mail and potentially more noticeable than an email message, says Eric Anderson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

MBA’s should take note that the new tools of relevancy are now getting to be more mainstream.  These tools will only get better with time, and it increases the value of a direct marketing message & campaign.  In general, 2010 will bear out whether these trends will stick, improve or change – but one thing is certain – if the recession has forced us to go “back to basics” , direct marketing is certainly one of these.