Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

Hi Jodie

I think that the short answer is yes - and I’m not involved in direct mail, so I don’t have a cause to promote.

General email marketing is certainly not dead, but its effectiveness has fallen off a cliff in the last 3 years. Our own results and those of our clients back this statement. We sell Maximizer Enterprise CRM systems and obviously use its rather powerful email campaign capabilities both for our own marketing purposes and those of our customers.

Response rates to emails sent to a bought in list have diminished by a factor of about 100 over the last 5 years, regardless of the sophistication of the content and the level of personalisation.

The exception is with the B2B opt-in email and newsletter where the recipient has given explicit permission to receive our email, usually on the phone. The technology we employ, via the Maximizer Marketing Campaign Manager ensures that these emails are sent out individually and are not likely to be blocked by SPAM filters, annoy our ISP or naff off the recipient’s IT manager. Responses are good and again, due to the technology employed, we can see who has viewed, read and even forwarded our communications. As well as track and act on any replies.

Direct mail is making a comeback. The upturn is slow, but already this year the institutes of direct marketing both in the UK and the USA are reporting increases in volume and more hopefully, for well constructed non-junk mailings, an increase in the percentage response rates.

Again, we deploy our CRM technology to ensure that contacts have direct mail exclusion fields if they have indicated that they would prefer not to receive a mailing. These fields are also populated when we or our clients purchase and import a mailing list.

The care with which a piece of direct mail is constructed, addressed and otherwise personalised has also becoming of paramount importance. The days where a brown envelope with a wonky sticky address label enclosing a photocopied price list addressed to dear sir or madam have not gone, but those persisting in such practices are wasting their money.

There is also a resurgence in using behavioural database techniques to optimise the profitability of mailings, such as RFM coding. (Recency, Frequency and Monetary coding) and I’ve just completed a project to apply this to Maximizer. In the past, such sophisticated coding techniques would only be used by companies who could afford to implement it on their Oracle or Informix database.

That smaller companies now want to work out how not to waste 65% of their direct mail budget is most encouraging for their direct mail efforts and even more encouraging for smaller CRM companies like us who have always been able to take the “Big Boy’s Tools” to the smaller enterprise, were it not for the fact that the smaller enterprise’s directors seemed to be disinclined to believe that it could be done without too many zero’s after the first digit of the bill!
The last degree of personalisation, of which I have now seen 3 examples, is to employ someone with impeccable handwriting to address the envelopes and to use a stamp instead of a franking machine. That gets the thing opened and thereafter, the contents must make their mark.

Again, I have had reports from clients, stating that demand for innovative content for direct marketing is 30% up this year – with folding media information cards leading the way. See https://www.curveballprintmedia.com/fold/ as an example of a client of ours whose own business is growing on the back of their own client’s growth in DM activities.

As a matter of record, they do all their own NPD via a loop that includes DM, using email only for client retention and newsletters.

Apologies to any email marketers I have offended amongst my MarketingProfs colleagues and friends. Complaints should be addressed to me by letter, written by hand, with a fountain pen to the email address in my Bio!

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions