Sure, everyone has an opinion about “Junk mail”, and most of them are negative. However, most consumers don’t understand the intention of companies that advertise their services via this channel. So, before passing judgment, it might help to review the facts.
First and foremost, no company that advertises direct to the consumer has any desire to send a direct mail piece that is of no interest to the recipient. There’s a significant cost to each mail piece and if it’s directed to the wrong demographic that has no affinity or interest in the offer, it becomes wasted money.
Second, most consumers don’t realize that our entire US Postal Service is funded in large part through the revenues produced by standard class mail. It’s a fact that the direct mail you receive ensures the delivery of your personal mail on a daily basis.
So how do we reconcile this dilemma? It’s obvious that we need to get better at targeting the right offer to the right person at the right time. Let’s start with the basics. My first name (Chris) is ambiguous, so it could be male or a female. If I received an offer for a craft magazine, I’d dump it straight into the circular file. However, if I received a golf magazine offer (or any other golf-related offer for that matter), I’d open it immediately given my addiction to the game.
This basic illustration exemplifies the need for direct marketing companies to target very specific segments based on demographic, psychographic, and lifestyle data points. In fact, the objective for all direct mail marketers should be to mail fewer pieces while generating a higher response, and thus a greater return on marketing dollars spent.
Marketing expert Philip Kotler, author of the new book Chaotics: The Business of Managing and Marketing in The Age of Turbulance, makes this very point in an interview in the July 2009 issue of Deliver Magazine.
He says, “I’ve always thought that direct mail was one of the best concepts for marketing because you can tailor your offering. Rather than send a big blast with the same offer to a million people, you can move into one-to-one marketing — if you have a robust customer database. If you have enough information about the individuals you’re targeting — occupation, income, age and so on — you’ll stop mailing offers to people where there’s no chance of them buying.”
He adds, “Predictive analytics can help you estimate the purchase probability of an offer to a specific customer. Your software can go down a list of customers and assign a probability number to each. You can decide ‘I’m only going to send this offer to customers who have a 50-percent or higher probability of responding.’ This could reduce the size of a mailing from 5,000 people to maybe 500 people. You’ll have a much higher response rate than the usual 1 to 2 percent we get from direct mail because you’ve identified the individuals who are most likely to buy — and your overall mailing cost is greatly reduced.”
Kotler’s advice resonates in a market that continues to incur year over year postal increases, and that’s why it’s increasingly critical that marketers know exactly who they should be targeting.
But if you’re a small to mid-sized marketer, how do you effectively target without spending a small fortune on analysts and software?
AmazingMail has a solution. We offer a low-cost, highly automated service that guarantees the very best response based on mathematical algorithms and scientific regression models. This service ensures your targeting is precise, and that in turn generates much higher return on investment for your campaigns. Then, for even higher lift, we can integrate digital marketing components such as personalized URL, email and SMS text into your targeted direct mail campaign, maximizing potential results.
(Chris Lynde is President and CEO of AmazingMail.com, Inc. and has more than 20 years of direct marketing industry experience. 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.)
