Make Holiday Marketing a Gift That Keeps Giving

The holidays are not only a key time for boosting immediate sales, they are also one of the most important periods for gathering data and customers that will generate profit in the year ahead. A new infographic from the Marketo blog provides some good tips on how to optimize your holiday marketing investment for future ROI. First, look at the "ghost of holidays past" and note that both online sales per shopper climbed between 2014 and 2015 and offline purchases (in-store and mail order, for example) also went up. In fact, industries such as apparel saw 11.1% offline sales growth, technology rose 6.5%, and health and beauty climbed 5.1% in offline sales. A strong multichannel data gathering and marketing investment is required if you want to maximize sales moving forward. Meanwhile, in digital marketing, there is no denying the growing importance of social media, with 55% of respondents saying a brand’s social presence has at least some influence on their decision-making during the holiday season. So your strategy should not only boost social efforts during the holidays but keep them strong all year to capitalize on customer relationships. What if you succeed in driving more online traffic but don't reap the conversions desired over the holidays? Don't accept marketing defeat; capture customer information and retarget! This is especially true for industries with "considered purchases," those that are high-cost, high-involvement and life-cycle oriented, the Marketo researchers point out. Just using a Facebook retargeting campaign, marketers report an average 92% increase in impressions, 33% lower cost per action and 26% lower cost per click, for example. And a key goal should be to turn as many new customers captured with those holiday sales into repeat customers. That means a well-thought-out, multichannel retention strategy. The payoff: The average repeat customer spends 67% more 2.5 to 3 years into a shopping relationship than in the first 6 months. For more tips, see the article and infographic: http://blog.marketo.com/2016/11/reap-the-benefits-of-the-most-wonderful-time-of-the-year-all-year-long-infographic.html

Planning B2B Mail to Win Decision-maker Attention

Business-to-business direct mail must leap basic hurdles to get through to decision-makers and prepare the way for sales. For one thing, there is usually a gatekeeper sorting the mail before it ever gets into the hands of a decision-maker/buyer. Getting past this gatekeeper means designing a mail package so it stands out and looks important/interesting, yet doesn't scream junk mail. Successful design tactics include dimensional mail and oversized formats (No. 11, 9X12 or 6X9 envelopes, for example). Then the copy (from teaser to letter) must do some heavy lifting. Studies have shown that, especially for the C-suite level, this means 1) focus on a topic that is significant to the target market, 2) provide a solution to a problem/pain point, 3) prove value with third-party endorsements, 4) intrigue with new information or perspective, and 5) as with any direct marketing, include a call to action--an attractive, time-sensitive offer. But probably the most important part of a B2B direct mail effort will be the list targeting. Selecting by industry and company size, based on profiling of best customers, is useful, but what about the title/department targeted? Here's where it gets trickier--especially when you move from the small business realm to the mid-sized or enterprise company where decisions involve multiple players. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Newly released research by LinkedIn, based on a survey of 6,000 buyers, marketers and salespeople in seven countries, shows the number of departments involved in a B2B purchase decision varies significantly by industry. As an example, the number of departments involved in buying ranges from 3.4 for the travel industry up to 4.6 for manufacturing. When it comes to which department is most influential, results again depend on industry and product. For example, promoters of marketing and advertising services tap the marketing department as the most influential in buying, while adtech products choose Finance as a top target, and online media platforms go direct to media and communications buyers. For details relevant to your B2B targeting, take a look at the LinkedIn report "Which Departments Influence Buying Decisions in Your Industry?" at https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/blog/linkedin-b2b-marketing/2016/which-departments-influence-buying-decisions-in-your-industry---

Marketers Should Stop Snub of Third-Party Data

Many data-driven marketers seem to suffer from a costly bias that focuses on first-party and second-party data and gives short shrift to third-party data. For example, an April business2community.com report of the "Data-Driven Marketing Benchmarks for Success" study by Ascend2 and ZoomInfo shows that a company’s internal first-party data is used by 86% of data-driven marketers, but only 49% use data from marketing partners, 32% use data from channel partners, and a mere 27% use data from third-party vendors. Why the third-party data snub? Marketers may assume that first-party data is more powerful, but that power depends on data quality and completeness. In fact, third-party data has a vital role in enriching first-party data by adding key targeting information. Third-party data sets can be appended to first-party data to correct and fill in missing elements such as e-mail addresses, phone numbers, lifestyles, demographics, purchase indicators and more to strengthen customer insights. Second, while first-party data is more powerful for certain marketing goals--such as loyalty programs, targeting and retargeting existing customers, or profiling best customers--it's not going to provide a mailing list of new prospects for growth! Marketers can rent quality third-party data and segment these specialized data sets to target prospects by factors such as demographics or firm-ographics, trigger events, location, recency, purchase history, and more. Marketers also may assume that even second-party data from partners is of higher quality than third-party data. First, that ignores the inherited quality problems and integration issues of second-party sources. Second, more high caliber third-party data is available today than in the past. Marketers can further ensure third-party list quality by working with a data-independent provider, by selecting aggregated data from multiple quality sources and files, and by making sure all data is frequently updated and hygiened. For more on the power of third-party data for direct and digital marketing, read http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/the-power-of-third-party-data

Survey: Market Rewards B2B Predictive Marketers

Business-to-business marketers who use predictive analytics are rewarded with better revenue and market position, according to a recent Forrester Consulting survey. The study tapped 150 respondents from market-leading B2B firms in a range of industries, dividing them into predictive marketers, those using modeled data for forecasting and scoring, and "retrospective marketers" without predictive analytics. The survey, commissioned by predictive marketing firm EverString, found that B2B predictive marketers are 2.9 times more likely to have revenue growth above the industry average, 2.1 times more likely to occupy a commanding leadership position in their product/service market, and 1.8 times more likely to exceed company goals when compared with retrospective marketers. No wonder 89% of the B2B marketers interviewed included predictive analytics in their 2016 plans, either initiating or expanding implementation! Some 49% already used predictive marketing, 44% said they planned to expand or upgrade existing predictive implementation, and 40% planned to initiate predictive efforts within 12 months. Equally interesting, most of the marketers (78%) saw a shift in their role from demand generation to deal acceleration, requiring involvement in the sales cycle beyond pouring leads into the top of the funnel. And here is where predictive marketers led retrospective counterparts again. Predictive marketers showed effectiveness across the customer life cycle, with 49% listing two or more customer discovery tasks (building brand equity, audience targeting, identifying best account types, etc.) among their top three best practices, balanced by 51% including two or more tasks from later in the sales cycle (such as qualifying leads and managing the end-to-end customer experience). Retrospective marketers focused mainly on customer discovery in naming their top three best practices (70%). Marketing success with any stage in the sales cycle is still all about the data, however. Predictive and retrospective marketers agreed that their two biggest marketing challenges were ensuring quality data from a variety of sources (47%) and managing data from a variety of sources (47%). For a Forbes magazine summary with a link to the full report: http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2016/01/24/89-of-b2b-marketers-have-predictive-analytics-on-their-roadmaps-for-2016/#147e0488d291

Survey Cites Obstacles to Data-Driven Marketing Success

Despite technology advances and the bounty of "big data," data quality remains the biggest challenge for data-driven direct marketing. Consider MarketingProfs' report on a new Ascend2 global survey of marketing, sales and business professionals. In terms of the most important goals of data-driven marketing strategy, personalizing the customer experience led the field (60%), followed by measuring data-driven ROI (51%) and targeting individual market segments (50%). Then when it came to the biggest obstacles to success, companies put front-end data issues ahead of back-end analytics by a wide margin. Improving data quality was ranked as the No. 1 challenge to data-driven success (59%), followed by integrating data across platforms (51%), raising the level of data analytical skills (38%) and measuring data-driven marketing ROI (37%). In fact, only 16% of respondents rated the quality of their marketing data as "very good," compared with the 27% who rated data quality as "somewhat poor" to "very poor." The majority (57%) called their data "somewhat good," which is just not good enough for the most cost-effective marketing results! For more from the survey, read http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2015/28904/data-driven-marketing-top-objectives-and-challenges

With Bad Data Costing Average Direct Mailers So Much, Going Beyond the Average Solutions Pays Off

The average U.S. company wastes $180,000 a year on direct mail that does not reach intended recipients because of inaccurate data, per a handy Lemonly.com report on the impact of bad data. That's not so surprising when a recent Experian survey shows marketers rate a third of their databases as inaccurate, particularly when it comes to addressing. The annual cost of wasted mail is also no surprise if you consider the cost per thousand (CPM) by mail type in the Direct Marketing Association's 2015 "Response Rate Report" survey: CPMs range from about $585/M for postcard and letter packages to $1,000/M for oversized envelopes and $1,200 for dimensional mail. A company mailing out oversized pieces to 100,000 a month with 15% bad addresses/undeliverables will end up with over $180,000 in yearly waste in no time! The biggest source of undeliverable mail (76%) per the U.S. Postal Service is consumer and business change of address from the 17% of Americans who move/change addresses each year. Too many mailers assume that when they qualify for First Class and Standard mail commercial pricing by matching against the Postal Services' National Change of Address (NCOA) database, they've cleaned up the problem. Unfortunately, the NCOA database itself has issues because of lags in recording, look-back time limits (18 months and 48 months), and, most important, the up to 40% of consumer and business movers who do not report their change of address. So in addition to NCOA, mailers should match their data against the several additional Proprietary Change of Address (PCOA) databases that draw on private sources, such as magazine subscribers and financial information, to catch the big chunk of address changes and "dead/undeliverable" addresses that fall through the cracks. The savings is easy to calculate: Using several private data sources to find undeliverable and move data not recorded in the standard NCOA database costs between 15 cents and 25 cents per corrected record. These records will otherwise waste anywhere from 60 cents to $1.20 each in direct mail costs. There's also the lost response from prospects/customers who will not receive the intended mail piece, or any other offers. Even at 25 cents per fix, the savings is huge with mail rates as high as they are. Plus, the improved address correction allows for more effective merge-purge deduping and more savings. For a broader calculation of bad data's business impact, see the Lemonly infographic: http://lemonly.com/work/the-cost-of-bad-data/

Research Comes Together to Champion Direct Mail

Database marketing and direct mail are the focus of our business at DBM Designs, but we still encounter marketers who are dubious about fully embracing "junk mail." Our thanks to industry colleague UnitedMail for a handy infographic, just published in Target Marketing magazine, which uses research to make the case for direct mail in terms of its response, ROI and value in a multichannel strategy. Among the highlights: 70%-80% of consumers say they open almost all of their mail, including "junk mail," and 79% of consumers say they act on direct mail immediately (compared with 45% for e-mail). In terms of response rates, direct mail campaigns to customers average over 3% (e-mail campaigns get just 0.1%). Plus, combining mail with other channels significantly boosts marketing results; for example, research shows consumers who receive both direct mail and e-mail spend 25% more money. The infographic also offers insights on mail creative and print-to-online technology. See http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/direct-mail-roi-infographic/