At AmazingMail we process thousands of Mailings, and because we track customer results, we see plenty of success. This allows us to see practices that tend to work, and practices that tend to fail. From this, we have devised a few simple steps to guarantee a successful mailing.

The 5 elements of Mailing Success or failure:

1. Defining success
2. Targeting & Timing
3. Designing the mail piece
4. Defining the response process
5. Campaign Measurement

Defining success:

It may seem obvious, but defining the objective of a Mailing is the first and most vital step. How can you select your target audience or design your mail piece if you don’t have set marketing goals for success? Without a target result, you can’t determine its success or failure.

Many of our customers are small businesses with a limited number of employees – but typically more than one person has an interest or some input into a proposed Mailing. As soon as there is more than one person involved, there is an immediate need to get everyone on the same “page” (or the same “Postcard” for many of our customers).

The Sales Manager may expect the mailing to increase sales for the quarter, while the accountant may want the mailing to encourage sales of outdated merchandise.  Now, just imagine the problems the graphics department faces to design the mail piece!

So, the very first step is to get consensus on what you are trying to achieve, write it down and then put a number on it. If you want to keep your budget, don’t settle for sayings like, ‘find more customers”, “increase sales” or “move that old stuff”, and gain measurable ROI.

Targeting & Timing

Once we have decided what we want to achieve, the rest is easy – Get the right offer to the right people at the right time!

Look out for Part II. Targeting and Timing, next month…

The best product, the best offer or the best of anything has little impact if you’re hitting the wrong target: Eskimos may not be interested in a free air conditioning service.

Thankfully there are effective methods to help get you on the right track. First, avoid the spray and pray approach. Let’s get the right marketing message into the right hands.

There are a number of data modeling services that will analyze your existing database. These modeling tools will review your entire database and return an informative analysis that will detail all the important characteristics of your best clients whether they are businesses or consumers. A good modeling tool will deliver information such as age, gender, radius from location, habits and other lifestyle details of your current clients. Then it determines your most common type of customer and your best type of customer.

The biggest feature is then obtaining a mailing list that matches only the characteristics of your best clients. So, that next marketing effort will hit only those most likely to buy and it will significantly increase your ROI; less mailing and more results.

2. Repeat your message. Repeat your message.
Ok, now we’ve targeted the right audience and now we’ve crafted the right message. The next step is to spread the word.

The estimate of how many advertisements a person is exposed to per day range from 500 to over 3000. This number represents a significant and specific challenge to your advertising efforts: get noticed and get remembered.

The best way to accomplish this is repetition. When developing your next marketing effort, whether it is a direct mail piece, an email blast or some other medium, develop your campaign with a multi touch approach. Scope out your process with the number of times you will hit your target, the gap between touches and what each message will offer.

3. 1 +2 = Triggered Marketing
With these two critical steps in place, we can now focus on a method that produces high response rates and reduces wasted efforts: Triggered Marketing.

All outside branding efforts should contain a strong call to action. Once prospects take some action, we can now react to that with a customized response that is triggered by that behavior. Let’s say an email blast or a direct mail effort successfully entices prospects to fill out a form on a web site. Once that form is completed we can now trigger a follow up based on that action. If the form enticement was for access to white-paper that offered detailed information, we can send a postcard that is customized for that behavior. Another simple example would be triggered responses to trade-show sign ups. As you gather names of trade show attendees that stop by your booth, a triggered and customized message is sent just to visitors of your booth.

Triggered marketing can get much more complex and offer several levels of responses that depend upon users’ actions and subsequent actions.

1.  Knowledge Fire Sale

A method to promote both new and existing business is to educate your customers…  and do it for free. If you offer customers direct and actionable bits of information, they will become less cynical toward purchasing and treat you as more of a valuable resource of information rather than just a provider of a service or product.

On the next marketing drive offer valuable, useful and free bits of information. Clients will appreciate, respond and return.

This style of relationship with your clients will not only give you that respect as a knowledgeable resource, but it will also lessen the focus on price as your company is now more valuable all around.

2.  Word of Mouth Spreads Viral

The phrase “people do business with people they know” has been uttered many, many times. It’s time to think of your customer base as hundreds or thousands of salespeople. Don’t just sit and hope they’re going to tell others about your product or service entice them to do it…. Now.

Become that someone they know by setting up a referral program. This approach satisfies two important needs. It creates a system to reward your customers, by spreading the word, and it generates new leads from a trusted source.

If the referral setup is simple and the enticement is worthwhile it will go viral.

3.   Clarity

In times of abundance, marketing messages often have the freedom to be subtle and clever and depend more upon the repetition afforded by increased media buys and direct mail efforts. Today, less is more.  While most businesses are trying to do more with less and to focus on ROI, marketing messages should shy away from the clever and vague and be the clever and clear.

Review that direct mail piece and that email message. Is it clear and concise? Can your target audience grasp the message quickly?

Remember, if your company offers 10 services you do not have to nor should you try and fit all those messages in one campaign.

Stay Clear. Stay focused. Stay profitable.

The first question in any marketing effort should be: Who am I targeting? If you are sending a direct mail campaign to existing customers with a strong and clear offer you may well expect to receive a much higher response rate than 3%.

However, if you are marketing to a brand new demographic that has no relationship with your company; you may need to build that relationship before you can see higher return rates.

Furthermore, that new audience will require a different message than those familiar with your services. This means that your message needs to be tailored to your audience.  With the right message to the right audience, you will increase the response rate.

The last piece is to track. In order to learn what works and what doesn’t, you will need to incorporate tracking mechanisms. This can be accomplished using special toll free numbers, PURL’s, coupon codes, landing pages and more.

Now…. imagine vacationing on a cruise ship, take a picture with your cell phone, add a personalized messaged to the picture, hit the send button and have a real, high quality postcard printed and mailed the next business day. Your vacation adventure is now shared and delivered before you return to port.

Smart phone users can do just that by combining the picture taking ability of these devices with AmazingMail’s web-to-print engine to create real physical postcards – quickly, easily and inexpensively, from anywhere in the world, 24/7.

Using mobile applications developed by leading companies (ShootIt, Postino and PicCard), this capability is now available on your mobile device.

Basically, you snap a picture, add an accompanying message or draw it in some cases (i.e. your signature), enter the recipients address and send. That information is electronically sent to AmazingMail, who prints your high quality postcard and mails it the next business day.

You get high quality, personalization and quicker delivery for a lower cost… hard to beat that combination.

Your current customers are hiding a wealth of information and hold the key to new opportunities.

With services such as AmazingProspects, companies can now accomplish two things that were previously available only to large corporations with in-house statisticians: One, uncover hidden insights about their current customers and receive a revealing data analysis. And, secondly, get an accurate and targeted list of prospects that match all the attributes of your best customer.

This exciting new service gives all businesses the ability to quickly execute highly-targeted marketing campaigns that will deliver real responses.

Web to print, multi-channel solutions, integrated solutions and PURL are all solid and useful services that may get lost or diminished because of buzz word over kill. AmazingMail.com (AMI) has a handful of innovative and critical services that suffer this fate.

So, AmazingMail 101 is born.

First, we’ll start with the core service that every business and consumer can and should be using: AMI’s Web to print.

AmazingMail 101 – Web to Print

Web to print is pretty much how it sounds. Users go online and create a postcard (in a variety of sizes) by uploading their own images and/or logos, add their message, input the recipient(s) and send. The real postcard is sent the next business day… Amazing!

Here’s how anyone can use this service:

Home and Family Uses:

• Someone in your life have an upcoming birthday? Is mother’s day coming up? Or any other special occasion? Go to AmazingMail.com, choose from one of our many cards, add your own message and even images if you want, and then send a real card the very next business day
• It’s that easy. Plus you save the cost and time from traveling to the store, buying a card, getting stamps and then mailing it out
• Lessen the stress of wedding planning – choose from 1000’s of images or upload your own, upload your guest list and send out real, high quality cards the next day reminding all to save the date
• Traveling soon? There are a couple iPhone applications (Postino) that allow you to take a picture with your phone, type a message and send a real postcard that’s in the mail the next day
• These are only a few of the unlimited uses for our web to print technology

Business:

• Send out 1 or 1 million high quality postcards tomorrow to your clients or prospects
• Create a “thank you” card and after each sale, referral or meeting and send one postcard (yes, just one if you need)  to thank them
• And, schedule a second reminder postcard to go out in a week or a month

That’s just a simple overview of one of the amazing products from AmazingMail.com

Next AmazingMail 101… trigger based marketing

Dean Batson  |  Marketing Manager  |  www.AmazingMail.com

Office: 480-281-4829  |  Cell: 208-651-0121

1. Think small – You can’t put a PowerPoint on a postcard. At its biggest the front and back panels of a postcard are only 5 x 5 inches. So don’t try to make yours a full sales presentation. Just select one or two benefits you think your prospects will find most compelling. But do add a “call-to-action” – where they can go for more information such as a website and where you can make the sale. (Insert graphic postcard example)
2. Think big – Because they’re small, you can mail postcards for as little as one-third the cost of First Class mail. So you can afford to think of a bigger distribution than you would for flyers and other types of direct mail. With the speed of modern-day postcard marketing and printing technologies at your disposal, you can send out thousands of postcards overnight.
3. Smarten up your mailing list – Postcard marketing firms can groom your mailing list, helping you better target prospects that are most likely to become new customers. Or, if you don’t have one, they can create a list for you, based on the gender, age, income, location and other demographics of your most-likely-to-buy prospects. Even better, at least one postcard marketing firm, AmazingMail.com, can take your mailing list of prospects and clone it. Digging into consumer and business databases, the firm can produce a much bigger “look alike” list of your best customers. (Link to AM home, and AmazingProspects page)
4. Reinforce with other media – A postcard’s call-to-action can direct your prospect to a personalized web landing page, or PURL as it’s known. That’s where you can capture (with the prospect’s permission, of course) the prospect’s email and cell phone number. Next step, refine your call-to-action e.g. “make an appointment to see us”. Then send out unobtrusive but helpful reminders of that appointment by email or text messaging that shows up on the cell phone. (Insert graphic Purl example)
5. Keep your mailing lists healthy – First make sure your customer and prospect lists are up to date. Check internally with all who use the list to make sure postal and email addresses in particular are accurate. As you add new prospects, keep refining the lists and your rates of return will rise. Unrefined lists may generate a return rate of only 1% or 2% but a list which is truly targeted on your best prospects, with repeat mailings, can go as high as 20%.
6. Measure your ROI – Once the campaign is over and the new customers are in the door, pull out your receipts and write down what the postcard marketing campaign cost you, all in, e.g $1,995. Then total up the number of your new customers, e.g. 52. Next make a hard-nosed estimate of what that customer means to you in terms of annual sales, e.g . $325. Multiply your new customers by that estimate e.g 52 x $325 = $16,900 – which, in this example, gives you a return on investment for you campaign of a whopping 847%! Not an imaginary or uncommon result, but the actual ROI of a very happy AmazingMail customer.
7. Think again – Resist the temptation in these penny-pinching times to shift your campaigns entirely to digital media. As the British say about spending their money unwisely, such a move would be penny wise and pound (£) foolish. Studies undertaken by the likes of the Winterberry Group since the onset of the recession show that: “Though some marketers shifted mail spending to digital media as a lower-cost alternative to their traditional campaigns, most have found that online channels demonstrate greater value as a complement to direct mail applications, reinforcing the value of integrated programs.” (Link to Winterberry Group site)

(Stephen Barrón is Director of Business Development for AmazingMail.com, Inc., and has more than 20 years of direct marketing 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.)

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.)

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.)