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.