With marketing budgets being cut and advertising spending limited, economic pressure is forcing everyone to market smarter. “Spray and pray” mailers are no longer delivering the results businesses need, whether you are a large or small-to- medium (SMB) business. Effective business marketing today requires both personalization, and automation.
In my role as VP Marketing of AmazingMail.com, Inc., I was invited by the Phoenix CEO-CFO Group, at its July 27 luncheon, to address 50 of their C-level members about how new direct marketing tactics and capabilities can drive revenue in a down economy.
Drawing on advice published and broadcast by other, better-known marketing experts I made the case that the key to effective direct marketing in today’s world boils down to careful targeting and personalized, focused and integrated multi-channel campaigns.
This is why AmazingMail has made a major investment in developing a new, automated multi-channel marketing platform called AmazingCampaigns that delivers trigger-based, text-to-print, text-to-mobile, digital direct mail, email and personalized Web page (PURL) campaigns.
The platform employs an intelligent front end we call AmazingProspects. It’s an automated service that allows our clients to “clone” their best customers against consumer and business databases with profiling and modeling technology.
AmazingProspects utilizes automated analytics software to uncover hidden insights about an organization’s current customers (or in the case of non-profit businesses, donors), and delivers a ranked list of “look-a-like” prospects that are “clones” – having the same or similar characteristics of best customers or donors. As a result, these cloned prospects have a much higher likelihood of becoming new customers.
How this helps our clients – and any business – is that we’ve made analyzing their customers, targeting qualified prospects, and reaching those customers and prospects with integrated multi-touch, multi-channel campaigns easy and affordable.
This makes acting on expert marketing advice something any company can do, including SMB’s.
For instance, Barry Judge, Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy is considered a marketing industry innovator who writes a blog (http://barryjudge.com) that has a large business following.
In a down economy, he advises seeking out pockets of demand to invest marketing resources in. Specifically he counsels:
- Identify and focus investment on your highest value customers
- Target product segments based on “need” (e.g. mobile phone and PCs as necessities)
- Identify and invest in consumer segments that show growth despite a declining economy
Good advice, but to act effectively on it would usually be out of reach for most companies because it would take skilled analysts weeks, at a cost of thousands of dollars, to execute.
Not anymore. Using our automated analytics and predictive modeling software, these are tasks that can be done in minutes at a cost most any company can afford.
Judge also advises that companies focus and integrate their marketing programs:
- Maximize ROI by trimming back on programs with lower response (newspaper, radio, magazines) and increasing spending on programs that elicit higher response (direct mail, email)
- Integrate those programs so they are part of a focused campaign
Again, good advice, but how can an company with limited marketing resources get this done?
Answer: By using AmazingMail’s trigger-based automated campaign software that lets you map out an integrated campaign through simple icon-driven point and click.
Another well-known marketing expert, John Coe, CEO of The Sales & Marketing Institute and author of The Fundamentals of B2B Sales and Marketing (McGraw-Hill), advises that, especially in a declining economy when customer perception of value is changing, that you use knowledge of customer or prospect characteristics to guide your creative and offer development, and that you make each offer as personal as possible.
Again, our ability to automatically analyze and segment customer and prospect characteristics, combined with our capability to personalize mailings and landing pages, becomes a powerful but affordable way to act on this expert advice.
The bottom line is that through the last decade, AmazingMail has made technological innovation, cutting edge products, world-class service and performance our hallmarks for success. Let us put all that we have developed, and all that we know, to work for you. Let us help you win market share – right now – through smart, focused direct marketing.
“This is not the time to cut spending on marketing. It is well documented that companies who increase spending during a recession improve their market share and return on marketing investment at much lower cost than during good economic times.”
John Quelch, Harvard Business Professor, author of Harvard Business Online’s Marketing Know: How
(Peter Vanderlee is VP Marketing with AmazingMail.com Inc., located in Phoenix AZ. AmazingMail’s automated, multi-channel direct marketing platform, AmazingCampaigns, delivers text-to-print, text-to-mobile, digital direct mail, email and personalized Web page (PURLs) campaigns.)
