International direct marketing

International direct marketing – or you could just stick pins in your eyes! Hang on, I could be putting myself out of a job here. International direct marketing and acquisition campaigns – they are fab – they are exciting – you should all be doing them! As usual, the reality is somewhere in the middle.

International press is struggling – the closure of BusinessWeek’s European and Asian marketing departments bears testimony to this (and yes, this is from the horse’s mouth!). The layoffs, the downsizing, the budget cuts, the outsourcing of many functions within that basket of titles, the EBRS results, all bear testimony to tough times. But, maybe that’s what this market needs, a shake up – there will be winners and survivors – there always are.

So, what should those publishers still hanging on in there be up to? What should be their priorities? To strive for maximum efficiency and, as usual, approach everything with a healthy dose of common sense. Also, maximising collaboration makes a lot of sense and is working well for the less paranoid (shared freight deals can save you tonnes!).

International vs local

International direct mail always brings up the debate of local versus international – ie. should I be mailing international lists from the base country – usually the UK, or should I be doing things locally – ie. a German mailing to the Germans. Well, after five years of testing this, I can categorically come down on the side of the international approach (at least for now, because, as we all know, you should retest these things regularly, as the world doesn’t stand still, so who knows what’ll be the case in 6–12 months unless someone out there keeps testing it). However, the local competition is tough and growing – there are some excellent local language, locally fulfilled products, with some international coverage, but – that’s generally what they are at present – local products with some international coverage. You could argue that a European publication that comes out of the USA could be a touch more European – always helps if it’s spelt in English; at least the direct mail pack should be.

I have tested German lists, Italian Lists, French Lists, Netherlands Lists, and never yet managed to get them to work as well as the international ones – and I have tested local language packs, and mixed English / American and local language, locally posted, locally fulfilled, used local agencies, sourced and used local premium suppliers, because it should work, but it hasn’t yet, not on my watch.

I’ll admit to some early promise, some peaks in gross response, but then a very disappointing back end, even when trying bespoke billing / local payment methods / local credit control / local telephone customer service centres.

So, what’s that leave? Back to the same old international approach. Use international lists - those subscribers to your competitive set, who read English / American language publications.

Two new problems

There’s a new problem here though. Well two, at least. Those publishers who have recently realised that they haven’t exactly complied with the data protection rules when they collected those names – oops – best we take them off the market for now then, rather than come unstuck in a court of law.

And secondly, mailing lists which aren’t being mailed by their owners means degradation and fatigue – at an alarming rate of knots. Fortunately, the subscription based lists aren’t too bad. At least they are being sent a magazine / newspaper / journal, so there should be a reader at the other end. But any selections that might include sample mailing responses, trialists, MGM offers, donor names, copies being mailed to boost surveys, are not going to perform so well.

Questions for your list broker

And how can you be sure exactly what you are getting from the list broker or list manager? You have to ask some rather pointed questions. Firstly, ask exactly what selections are available. Then check what you asked for last time and how it performed (you do have a historical list history database going back x years I hope) - and is that what you actually got?

Consider asking for permission to run internal dedupes between lists supplied for different campaigns. If you handle this carefully, you can do this legally, and if they are supplying you with what you asked for, they really shouldn’t have a problem with you doing this.

Ask them what their own activity to this list has been. Consider asking for names that only came in in response to their control series – because if it’s all response to a very low priced offer, it could bomb for you. You should already be on all your competitors’ mailing lists, so you should rightly know the answer to this question before you even ask it.

Managing your list broker

It’s well worth finding a list broker who you build up a wealth of knowledge and trust with over time – they can sniff out these pitfalls for you, and once they have signed the non disclosure agreement, I would advise giving them all your list history – why ask them to do a job with both hands tied behind their backs? It won’t serve either of you well. This doesn’t preclude regular head to head testing with other list suppliers – but don’t be too surprised if not much comes of it, except a lot of extra work for the publisher, and a rather disappointing set of recommendations. By all means be on all the brokers’ and managers’ email lists – be aware of all the new and revised offerings, but use these to prompt your own broker, rather than do all the work yourself for no real gain. With all the cutbacks nowadays, you need to make all your agencies really work very hard for you.

Checking your mail

And be aware of what else you are receiving through the mail. If you set up your seed names carefully, you should be able to work out what other lists your own set are using – you might not know how it’s working for them, but it’s a useful pointer if you admire their marketing team!

And, if you are collecting all their direct mail (and don’t forget their email offers too), you should have a pretty good idea of their testing and strategic offerings.

Lead generation

Also, what are you doing to create you own lead generation? Have you actually trawled round all the other parts of your organisation to see if they are sitting on some data (legally obtained, of course) that could be useful to you too? And, if they don’t have anything, what can you do to produce some leads of your own?

* Trial offers
Can look unprofitable until you project in list rental revenue as another stream – then check your sums again, and maybe adjust the term or length of the trial.

* Readership offers
Now who has those names? Even if there’s a data entry cost, you should load some (find an intern), test them and see what the ROI is.

* Member get member offers
If you’re not doing these 2–4 times a year, you are missing a trick – and if you do them as run-ons to other campaigns the unit price for the P&P is nice and low! And you don’t need a fancy pack.

* Reader competitions
Now editorial may not like them, but hey, it’s worth having the discussion.

* Lapsed and cancelled names
And what are you doing with all those lapsed and cancelled names – maybe spending money with your fulfilment bureau to keep them on file year after year? Well, good, mail them, and mail them often, and for many many years to come – they will probably outperform all other lists that you have – be amazed, be very amazed at these results. You might want to move them off the subscriber database though and keep them on a promo list with your merge purge house – that’ll save you some money which you can plough back into testing.

* But beware …
And beware the compiled list (local or international) – they still seem to come mainly from graveyards (can I be sued for saying that?). And be wary of the list that’s marketed by a number of people but under a different name – they’ve relaunched it – great! Why did they need to?

* Ok, where else?
Email names? Web Registrants? Sample copy requests? Event attendees? Single copy sales names? Bulk sales names? These are all names you should be collecting, deduping (please dedupe everything against your subscriber list) and mailing or emailing. Email campaigns are great – quick to do, quick to execute, nice fast results back… and cheap! Again, find a supplier who manages the entire process, and will do templates and multiple paragraph changes for absolute minimum cost. And they should be able to do all the discounts, pricing and local currency equivalents from a simple table.

Interestingly enough too, check your email offers against your direct mail offers – don’t assume they should be the same. There seem to be some different trigger and price points in the two audiences. I’ll let you discover exactly what and where for yourself, after all, one size doesn’t fit all.

Consistent routing

Oh, just a thought with your international campaigns, especially in light of the massive deregulation of postal carriers… pick a carrier, pick your routings and ask them, contractually if necessary, to stick to them. If they don’t, and one campaign goes via Barbados, and the next via Russia, you will never be able to use your historical response curve prediction tool. Yes, you really can know how much response you should have in by which date (allowing for bank holidays etc), unless your carrier takes it upon themselves to ‘do you a favour’ – which usually means save themselves some money and improve their margins on your job.

This might take some doing, as some of them just don’t understand why you would want consistent routing. But it’s worth pursuing this point. It can all be scuppered if the carrier gets you in on a cheap rate and then tries to push through a price hike, as you’ll either have to move again, or cave in. But it’s always worth having a grown up conversation with suppliers from day one about exactly what you expect from the business relationship, and that if you both want to try for something longer term than five minutes, the ground work is always worth it.

Anyway – good luck…!