The Pitfalls of Relevant Direct Marketing
Relevant Direct Marketing is the way marketing should be done! Some people call it personalised, some people call it customised. But relevance is basically the art of understanding your audience so well, that you can speak to them in a tone and with information that precisely meets their needs.
For example – take the best sales person in your organisation, or the best person who works with your customers, and start listening to what they say to the customers. Your top sales people or customer service reps are really good at figuring out what the customer wants, and giving them the value proposition and the message in a tone that works for them.
They are truly practicing the art of relevant marketing every day. The challenge is that they only do that on a one on one basis. When they succeed, magic happens, right? Customers say, “How can I buy?” So how can we do that in a much more scaled fashion? Instead of talking to one individual, how do we talk to hundreds or thousands of people? That is what Relevant Direct Marketing can accomplish.
How do we make relevance work? Here are five of biggest mistakes that make marketing so irrelevant?
1. Same message to all
Long gone are the days of a one dimensional, blanket approach to communications. Personalised and relevant communications can deliver increases in response rates by as much as 30% over generic content. It’s now possible to customise each and every communication piece with different text, graphics, fonts, and even charts and tables to capture attention.
2. Not connecting with customers when they are in their buying cycle
This is a fundamental issue as the timing of most marketing is dictated by when the company is ready to send out a message and not by when the customer wants to buy. If you send out to 100 people, only 30 might actually be in the market to buy that product or service at that time. So there’s no way you’re going to sell anything to the remaining 70 people. You can try as hard as you want, but they are just not in the market to buy the product at that time. So it’s important to figure out which customers are in the market and how to hit them with the right message at the right time. This probably has the most leverage in terms of getting the biggest response. Timing is critical. With offset litho printing and some other traditional methodologies, this approach just wasn’t possible because you had to create these large scale printing jobs. Now with digital printing, you can send out 100 offers a day all based on incoming preferences that you’ve received from customers. Digital print on-demand makes it all possible.
3. Not making your response mechanism relevant
Marketers will spend countless hours arguing about copy. How many people have had the experience of someone saying that one word doesn’t look right? And they’ll spend hours massaging the message until they get it exactly right. They send this perfect message out, and low and behold, somebody responds to it and says I’m interested in this product. Or I’m interested in this offer. And then they call or go to the website and say I’m interested in buying this. And what do they find? The confusing jungle called your website. They can’t even find the product or they can’t find the special offer. They call the call centre. And the call centre people say “Huh? Some marketing manager told me this product was coming, but we don’t know anything about it.” Or they go to the retail store and nobody there has an answer either. So what does that mean? All the great marketing that was done has been wasted. So when we think about marketing, when we think about what we do, we have to optimise the whole experience.
4. Focusing on one channel or medium
Print is only one channel. There a lot of other channels and we should consider developing targeted, relevant campaigns that work across a number of communication channels including print, web, e-mail and mobile. Targets will receive your messages in a variety of formats that work together to deliver campaigns that maximise attention, response and action.
5. Not testing enough to optimise your direct response advertising
The value of direct marketing over brand marketing is that you can measure response. By testing, you can help improve the response. By not testing, you just waste all that value.
