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.

AMiable Solution #128: New Numbers, New Objectives

So you’ve decided to approach 2015 as a fresh start: a new opportunity to succeed.  Maybe you’ve decided to focus on growing your house list.  Increasing house response.  Prospecting more.  Or fine-tuning the timing of your promotions. 

No matter what you’d like to do to make your numbers grow in 2015, there’s a simple way to make your goals more achievable.  Quantify your efforts.  General goal statements are great for giving you direction, but quantified objectives give you the push you need to get going.  They make your goals measurable, so you know when you’ve arrived.

Were you looking to increase the size of your house list this year?  Be specific about your goal.  Maybe that means focusing on building brand recognition in a certain region or mailing five additional promotions to a “minor” segment of your market.

Planning to prospect more?  Commit to just how many additional pieces you plan to mail or how many additional new rental lists or list selects you plan to rent.

Want to increase sales or donations?  Determine just how much of an increase you’re aiming for: 5%, 10%, more?  Identifying the end-goal now will help you determine your moves throughout the year.

Your objectives are, of course, yours and can only be defined by your needs, your products or services, and your resources.  But they are universal in that they give your goals power and your 2015 more resolve.

AMiable Solution #127: New Year, New Numbers

New Year’s resolutions have become the butt of many jokes.  The resolutions themselves are often common and cliché: lose weight, exercise, make healthier decisions.  So why do people still make them?  Because January 1 offers something no other day of the year offers: the chance to start over.

Thankfully, do-overs aren’t limited to personal endeavors.  Most marketers get a fresh start in January, too.  No matter what the numbers looked like last year, a new calendar year provides businesses and organizations with a clean slate: new budgets, new goals, new chances to succeed and grow.

But to make the most of the new year, you have to understand the old one(s).  Which marketing efforts worked?  Which need to be reworked?  Which should be eliminated entirely from the 2015 marketing plan?

Although your marketing budget and plan were probably “finalized” months ago, it’s never too late—or too early—to reallocate, revise, or reschedule your original plans.  Make sure your new year brings great new results by reassessing the following:

House list.  Did your customer/donor/member base increase, stay the same, or decrease in 2014?  How did last year’s total compare to previous years?  If your list isn’t growing, you may need to re-evaluate your planned prospecting efforts for 2015.  If your list is shrinking, you may need to re-evaluate your house mailings and your core offers. 

House response.  Even if the number of clients stayed the same or increased, make sure the total sales or donations followed suit.  Maintaining a steady number of clients is great, but if those clients are ordering less or contributing fewer dollars, your bottom line is heading south and your marketing plans—even your product or service offers—may need to be beefed up to maintain your expected income.

Timing.  If promotional response seems to be off, it may be a timing issue.  Compare last year’s drop dates to key release or industry dates and see if production and distribution delays—even slight ones—may be responsible for the underperformance of a campaign.  Timing could be a particularly key issue for “standard,” reliable campaigns that fell short in 2014.

New endeavors.  So you decided to delve into a new trend or technology last year.  How did it work out?  Decide if further testing is justified or if your marketing dollars would be best spent elsewhere this year.

Whether your new year’s goals are strictly professional or personal, too, we wish you big response, big numbers, and big successes.

AMiable Solution #126: Life Beyond Our Laptops

Technology has made us pretty lazy.  We can look up customer stats, research prospects, investigate new markets, and coordinate the buying and selling of any number of products and services without ever getting out of our seats or interacting with another human. 

We’re not alone.  Consumers are pretty machine crazy, too.  According to a study by Synqera and reported by Print in the Mix in February of this year, 81% of U.S. consumers surveyed own a laptop.  Sixty-five percent of them own smartphones.  Forty-eight percent own tablets.  Thirty-seven percent own all three.

But just because we have all of this technology at our fingertips doesn’t mean we should always use it.  Sitting down with the originator of a report after reading the report, meeting regularly with members of customer service, asking clients questions over the phone instead of through email, and interacting with vendors in person not only builds relationships, but also offers greater insight and perspective on the things we read about.

And there are more benefits to putting down the data and pursuing more traditional methods of communication, including print: it seems that customers get a little tired of the technology, too.  This past February Print in the Mix also reported that 75% of consumers said they would prefer to receive promotional content and coupons in print.  More than 80% said they wouldn’t look for promotions and coupons on a company’s mobile app, and 73% said they don’t want to receive promotions or coupons on their mobile devices.

Technology does, of course, make our lives easier and provides us with opportunities we wouldn’t otherwise have.  Still, there is truth to the saying about having “too much of a good thing.”  Sometimes, more basic forms of communication are just better.