AMiable Solution #132: Common Cents Tip #3

When you’re trying to improve campaign response, cleaning your mailing list may not make the top of your “to do” list, but it deserves a spot.  Mailing duplicate addresses or bad addresses not only tarnishes your results, but it also increases your costs.

Start by checking your house list regularly.  Whether you choose to clean it up at the beginning of the year, the end of the year, or before your big, annual campaign, pick one—or two—key time to inspect the quality and accuracy of your list.  Let your data processor run your list through the Postal Service’s tools to make sure the addresses are current and deliverable.  Perform an internal merge/purge to remove duplicate addresses for individuals.  Identify and remove addresses of deceased individuals or out-of-business businesses.  Doing so will give you a more accurate view of your house “universe,” and it will save you from spending printing and postage dollars on marketing that will never reach its market.

Then, be sure to merge/purge your house list with your rental lists for every campaign.  Rental lists pulled from similar industries or with similar criteria are bound to have duplicate names.  The more rental lists you incorporate, the more at risk you are of wasting money.  Work with a data processor to establish your merge/purge criteria and then wait for the results.  You’ll be able to more accurately determine print counts, and you’ll have a better handle on your postage costs.  You’ll also find out which rental lists are better maintained, and you’ll see which list fees you can seek reductions on, based on the number of undeliverable names. 

One final thought: identifying the duplicates and mailing to just one occurrence cuts down on customer frustration, printing quantities and costs, and postage costs.  But the benefits don’t end there.  Identifying the multibuyers earns you another contact opportunity.  Wait a few weeks and remail your campaign to those individuals.  You paid for those names, after all.  

AMiable Solution #131: Common Cents Tip #2

Some parameters are easy to identify.  For example, you know that if a former customer, client, or donor doesn’t respond to any marketing efforts in a specific period of time, your organization will mark that individual as inactive and remove him/her from the house list (or at least exclude the individual from future marketing campaigns).

Other parameters, however, may not be so easy.  If you haven’t identified your department’s “failure threshold” in different activities, you could be wasting more money than generating it.

What is a “failure threshold”?  It’s the point where you cut your losses.  The point that you know the likelihood of getting an acceptable return for your list, promotion, offer, format, effort, etc., is either non-existent or too small to justify continuing.

That may mean you add a new rental list to the “never again” column after only one mailing with a poor response, or it may mean that you discontinue trying it after three response duds.  Or it may mean you pull a web-only offer after two weeks if it fails to generate X number of orders or calls. 

How do you determine your threshold?  History.  Research.  Analysis.  This takes time, of course, and the results will be different for different industries, even different departments of the same organization.   But understanding how much your organization can--and should--invest in new, unknown, or even previously successful factors will help you set your boundaries and limit your risk.

Knowing when to say “when” shouldn’t be left to chance, and it shouldn’t be decided with every promotion that’s planned.  Pre-determining acceptable and unacceptable limits and incorporating them into your department-wide strategy will not only provide more consistency in your decision making, but it will also allow your marketers to spend their time and your budget more wisely.

AMiable Solution #130: Common Cents Tip #1

When you were in high school, thinking about your future and all the opportunities and careers you had to choose from, you--or someone who was looking out for you--likely gave you some great advice: stick with what you’re good at.

That’s not to say that you couldn’t pursue something you weren’t good at.  You could take on new challenges.  Learn new skills.  Develop new passions.  But you would also need to invest more to make it happen.  More resources.  More time.  More effort.

Now that you’re into your career, the advice still rings true for your department or organization.  You could take every task upon yourselves, or you could focus on the tasks you’re good at, most efficient at, and outsource or eliminate the others. 

For example, if your department is great at creating press releases and direct mail letters but a little less efficient in printing, folding, and stuffing them into envelopes, you could probably save money overall by letting a mail service provider do the production and collation, allowing you and your team to focus on writing and strategizing.

Or, if your customer service team handles incoming calls like pros but feels less confident about making sales calls, then it might make sense to hire a third-party to help.

Although hiring help from the outside may cost a little more in the near-term, allowing your team to focus on their primary responsibilities will help your bottom line in the long run.

AMiable Solution #129: New Objectives, New Energy

So you’ve identified new marketing objectives that will help you achieve your new budget numbers, which you’ve established for the new year.  Now what?

If you’re like many of us, translating any new action item or goal into action can be tricky.  It’s easy to stay entrenched in habitual thinking and regular patterns.  Trying something new takes more effort.

To help you think outside of the box, sometimes you actually need to step outside of the box.  Here are a few ideas to help you get there.

•  Try getting creative with someone else.  If you have a standard “go to” person for brainstorming ideas, consider collaborating with someone new.  It may be a person in the marketing department, sales, customer service, or even someone in another branch of your organization.  Sometimes all you need is to view your product or service from a different perspective.  That new perspective doesn’t have to come from a coworker, either.  If your office doesn’t already provide an internship program for local college students, now might be the time to look into one.  You could give an aspiring marketer some hands-on experience, and you in turn could get extra help and extra insight your upcoming campaigns.
•  Look into local or online training courses.  Breaking out of your routine often means learning something new.  There may be a new technology, a program, or a mindset out there waiting to boost your response.      
•  Get psyched up about new campaigns by reviewing old ones.  You review your campaigns’ performance on a yearly basis, but how often do you stop and look at the big winners from two, three, even five years ago?  As marketers, we tend to repeat some successful elements but discontinue or overlook others.  Relive the glory of the best campaigns of old and see if they revive your drive to create something fantastic.