I’m in a volcanic mood. As I write this, colleagues are stranded all over the world by the ash cloud of the Icelandic volcano, some in sunny climes and others in parts of the world they’d rather not be stranded in. So forgive the volcanic references, please – I did work for National Geographic after all.
Direct mail may have been dormant over the last few years, but it’s not extinct. It has faced up well to the pressure from other channels, particularly from email and social media, which were predicted to rule out direct mail as an effective channel and the marketer’s channel of choice. In fact, it’s a pretty smart tool in the hands of experienced people who know how to do direct mail well and link it to other channels for boosted success.
And if you’re new to the direct marketing business, you may have little experience of direct mail – it hasn’t been that fashionable recently. But if there’s the possibility of a hole in the rate base that you are responsible for – read on.
Direct mail: who’s doing it
OK, we all know that direct mail volumes are down, but does that mean you shouldn’t use direct mail in your marketing mix? Is the fact that direct mail volumes are down the right indicator of the medium itself? No.
20% of direct mail spend in 2009 in the publishing sector came from consumer magazines, 31% from daily newspapers and, sorry B2B magazines, according to Nielsen Ad Dynamix Jan–Dec 2009 who produced these figures, you’re way down at only .66%. And here is a figure you’ll all like from BMRB Q1 2010, over 90% of the sample said that they opened publishing direct mail if they were a customer of the sender. That’s off the Richter scale and bodes well for postal renewals, though the same research showed that more than 60% won’t open it if they have seen the information before which means it might be a good thing to get more variety into the renewal series.
Leaving aside the economic factors (I wish we could) and the huge decline in direct mail by the financial services industry, direct mail has suffered a bit from negative column inches in the national press. The combined issues of privacy and the environment have been high on the agenda, but both are manageable arguments and frankly have been overtaken by the volume of spam in the inbox and the consumer seeming to transfer the ‘junk mail’ tag to the leaflets that are the pyroclastic flow coming through the front door from pizza parlours. A great piece of direct mail has a better chance of being opened these days.
And although publishers generally know this, they have a hard time committing to direct mail because it needs a high proportion of the up-front budget, with breakeven coming further down the road. Short term thinking in a continuity industry, hmmm.
As ever, targeting is at the heart of getting the best out of direct mail; the right person, the right offer, the right timing, the right message, all must be considered and I don’t think the creative industry would argue with me if I said that data is the most important element of any direct marketing campaign.
However, what the web has brought us is the need for direct mail that speaks to the individual the moment it comes through the letterbox. We’ve got used to snazzy, clever, witty, colourful content on websites and the creative in direct mail needs to emulate that – no more dull plain envelopes without purpose please; they’ll be in the bin before you can say Eyjafjallajökull.
It’s not about how much direct mail you include in campaigns, it’s about how good it is across all the elements. It’s about what it looks and feels like and it may also be about how it tastes, smells or sounds, three reasons for opening mail given in BMRB Q1 2010 survey on the reasons to open mail. Women’s magazine readers like these things the most, apparently.
Response handling
So much for the outbound message, what about the response? How easy can you make it for people to respond? A coupon, yes, freepost yes, web address yes, inbound telephone yes, you’ll have tested them all to find the combination that gets the most prominence in your direct mail copy. You really do need to be able to compare the channel of the outbound message with the channel of the inbound response and use that intelligence wisely.
And if you give them a landing page, please don’t take them just to the home page and expect them to find the offer (surely nobody does that?). Whilst you have no more than milliseconds for someone to decide whether or not to open an email from you, you have several seconds to get them to focus on your direct mail pack, according to the eye tracking research of Professor Siegfried Vögele, whose groundbreaking methods have helped a whole generation of direct marketers, including me, to get their direct mail pieces opened and read.
Then it’s about analysis, getting the reporting right, taking account of unusual factors and circumstances, and being sure that what’s going into the circulation models is accurate, and yes in the publishing industry there is still that ‘hopeful’ direct marketing budget run on inaccuracy and unsupported facts.
LTV consideration
Are we measuring the true value of direct mail? It’s true that direct mail seems expensive on the face of it. It’s probably harder for you to get budget for a direct mail campaign than for an email campaign, for example, but they are not the same. In order to view the efficiency of any channel, a Lifetime Value Model is an absolute essential for today’s publisher.
OK, you may not seem to get pay-back in year one, but if you do it right you will definitely get payback. Nothing brings in volume responses like direct mail and, at least in my experience, direct mail acquired customers tend to be much more loyal and willing to hear from you about other products and services you may be promoting.
It’s notoriously difficult to measure the effect that direct mail has in supporting other channels in a multi-media campaign but in my opinion including direct mail as a medium will have a broader effect than may show in the statistical reporting. It’s a brand message. And if you need arguments to support the re-introduction or expansion of direct mail within your campaigns, it’s worth the effort to track as finely as possible its effect by channel across all the media that you use (and vice versa.)
Individuals may then respond to an email message or a telemarketing call, so the value of the direct mail package in sowing the seed to the widest audience remains difficult to measure but it’s in there somewhere amongst the white mail, and the un-coded responses.
Consider the pass on rate or the ‘keep it till later’ value of direct mail packs? In a TGI Survey Q4 2009, 51% of adults in the heavy / medium general magazine readers actually do something – of that 51%, 36% bought or ordered something, but 21% kept the pack for later use and 9% passed it on, so don’t cut off your response analysis too soon.
But what does our audience think? They speak with conviction. If you get it wrong they’ll tell you so (and the rest of the world via the social media networks) and if you get it right they’ll speak with their wallets and with their recommendations.
One-to-one marketing
We’re living in an era of needing to belong, but whilst we’re happy to be part of a self-selected community, we also need to be recognised as individuals.
Advances in technology, especially over the last two or three years, have provided direct marketers with tools they can more easily afford, and many more publishing companies are adopting a single customer view across all titles and product areas and have seen the benefits of a centralised database consolidating personal and transactional data to give even greater data intelligence on individuals.
And we are talking about individuals; one-to-one marketing is now perfectly achievable in direct mail, where the advances in digital printing provides marketers with the tools to ensure that the savvy consumer gets a communication in full colour with variable images and a message that truly relates to them as an individual. (Unlike my recent favourite example of poor targeting, which offered me the chance to retrain as a plumber!)
Campaigns that work the best think about the consumer as an individual and their channel preferences, whether expressed specifically or by the demographic intelligence available. You need to decide by which channel to contact each individual when the data is extracted for the next communication.
And by using that intelligence we can craft direct mail campaigns that talk to individuals, landing pages that reflect the creative and offer, email sequels or prequels that support the direct mail message and telemarketing scripts that reflect the brand’s tone of voice.
So should direct mail be at the epicentre of your marketing? Get it right and see your results go ballistic.
Some thoughts from leading figures in the industry:
“There has definitely been a resurgence in the use of direct mail for cold campaigns. For the last few years, email lists have been in high demand, but inbound clutter is driving open rates down for acquisition email (the latest DMA figures show 12% as the average). Despite its bad press, cold direct mail has a much higher open rate (FastMAP’s Marketing Gap research gives an open rate of 86% with the majority of consumers opening both warm and cold mail packs). Our clients are reacting to this by allocating more budget to mail – often integrated with other channels – and this tactic is paying off.” Rosemary Smith, Managing Director of list and data company, RSA Direct.
“A personal direct mailing pack is tactile, can be opened at leisure when the recipient is ready to look at your message, it does not demand attention now, but requests it when convenient. The feel of the paper, the quality of the print, the language and tone of the creative, the space you have to convey the benefits, all work together to re-enforce the brand offering at a time when the consumer chooses to give you their undivided attention.” Debbie Stenning, Managing Director, Database Vision.
“Direct mail had faded into insignificance for our acquisitions, but over the past two to three years it has had a major resurgence and is now one of our most cost effective routes to market and a significant volume generator. We are continually testing and tweaking our direct mail campaigns to further improve response rates and we see this is a channel that will only grow and become more and more important to us over the coming years.” Heidi Kenyon-Smith, Group Acquisitions Manager, The National Magazine Company
“Direct Mail still has a valuable place in the marketing mix – segmentation and personalisation are still key and our analysis shows that our customers use a real mixture of touch points throughout their buying process – we get people to buy online products through offline channels as well as print products online.” Sarah Howers, EMEA Circulation Marketing Director, Dow Jones International.
