Smart Direct Mail Reaps New-Mover Bounty

New-mover lists provide direct mailers access to one of the most valuable event-triggered consumer segments. A family move drives a leap in purchases of goods and services--household furnishings and appliances, home-improvement services, phone services, insurance, banking and financial services, medical services, pet care, restaurants and even nonprofits. In fact, research shows new movers spend more in the first three months after a move than most people do in a three-to-five-year period. A timely introductory mailer can not only reap immediate revenue, research also shows new movers are five times more likely to become long-term customers. Depending on promotion, final counts and costs, mailers may want to further target a new-mover mailing by factors such as household income, age, home value, presence of children, move distance, geographic radius and more. Because of proven response, new-mover mailings are popular, so it's worth some creative thought to stand out in the crowded mailbox of a new resident. A recent Target Marketing magazine article by Paul Bobnak, director of Who'sMailing What!, provides examples of four ways to improve impact. The first response-booster is a no-brainer: Offer a new-mover discount. Bobnak cites Pottery Barn's 5 3/4" X 10 3/4" self-mailer with three 15% off coupons redeemable in-store, online or by phone, plus promotion of free design services. Idea No. 2: Leverage marketing's tried-and-true emotional copy motivators (greed, guilt, fear, exclusivity, need for approval), such as the GEICO auto insurance mailer touting a potential $500 savings based on the new address. Hook No. 3: Offer desirable content with the promotion, such as a retail furniture chain's 16-page mini-catalog with tips on interior design along with coupons. Finally, Tip No. 4: Make it easy to respond. Bobnak shares a local hospital's postcard with mobile-scannable QR code leading to a pURL welcome landing page and pre-populated form, plus a gift (thermometer) for adding data such as insurance and e-mail address. For the examples: http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/post/4-hooks-mover-direct-mail/

B2B Lead Gen Rediscovers Direct Mail

Direct mail is enjoying renewed interest as a lead generation tool among business-to-business marketers, according to Demand Gen Report. Demand Gen Report's "2016 Demand Gen Benchmark Study" found direct mail not only still in the B2B marketing mix but earning increased spending by some marketers. Besides working to drive leads at the top of the funnel, direct mail was seen by surveyed marketers as an effective way to drive conversions later in the buying cycle, with 21% citing it as most effective at boosting conversions, tied with social media. A recent Demand Gen Report article interviews some B2B marketing execs to find out why they opt to invest in direct mail along with their digital lead-gen efforts like e-mail, search and social media. The CMO of Salesfusion sees direct mail as a way to stand out with the target audience, citing over-exposure in the digital space and touting a 10%-15% conversion rates for direct mail. Aptos is trying the same tactic and increasing direct mail spending, including a high-end mailer to nurture "suspects." Ricoh Americas also is sending out "high-end and very targeted dimensional mailers," especially to global and major accounts, and combining mail outreach with an interactive website and phone follow-up. B2B agency Babcock & Jenkins has "leveraged direct mail as part of an account-based marketing approach" for clients like CSC, IBM, Jive Software, Lifelock, Tripwire and Xerox, per the article. Stressing direct mail's place in an integrated strategy, Ruth Stevens, president of B2B consultancy eMarketing Strategy, explained why mail can be more effective at outreach than other channels: "In the B2B world, there's an increased understanding that you cannot get all the business you need by using e-mail as an outreach medium, since e-mail address data is far less available than physical addresses." Read http://www.demandgenreport.com/features/industry-insights/direct-mail-reborn-b2b-marketers-integrate-more-physical-mail-with-digital-channels

Are You Missing Out on Personalization's Big ROI?

Personalization via variable data printing is a proven way to increase direct mail response and ROI. Any mailer would want a result like this: Melissa Data has reported it found personalized color direct mail typically generated a 6.5% response rate, three times higher than the average 2% response rate resulting from non-personalized direct mail. Yet some direct mailers hesitate to go beyond a "Dear Jon" first-name greeting. It may be because they lack a robust house database and need a long-term data collection process and profiling. Appending and modeling are options to help jumpstart that process. When it comes to personalized prospecting, there are well-sourced, up-to-date rented mailing lists that offer a wealth of targeting data for personalization. Common response factors for B2C include gender, past purchase or donation history, expiration/renewal dates and geographic location (personalized mapping is a proven retailing tool), for example. A remaining personalization hurdle is data quality--inaccurate data, duplicate data, improperly formatted data, or no data at all in key fields. Bad data makes personalization backfire with the wrong name, the wrong address or the wrong offer. Luckily, given the payoff in terms of response and ROI, the low-cost investment in mailing list data hygiene is a no-brainer. Once data is cleaned up, careful mailing list segmentation by target audience preps for variable data printing (VDP) of personalized versions. While working with VDP, consider adding a Personalized URL that sends each contact to a personally customized landing page; research by the Direct Marketing Association and others shows PURLs can further lift overall response (even double it). By the way, if you are in fundraising or in finance and insurance marketing, and you haven't embraced personalization, you are lagging the pack. See the most recent list of top direct mail categories using personalization, courtesy of Who's Mailing What: http://www.directmarketingiq.com/article/whos-mailing-what-direct-mail-categories-using-personalization/1

Study Shows Bad Data Undermining Marketers

If you worry that customer data problems are hurting your marketing results, join the crowd. Poor data quality continues to drag down ROI for the majority of U.S. businesses. In fact, the average U.S. organization believes that one-third of its data is inaccurate, and a whopping 91% of companies believe revenue is being negatively affected by inaccurate data in terms of wasted resources, lost productivity, or wasted marketing and communications spending, according to the Experian Data Quality study released this year. One of the most common culprits cited was poor address data quality. The study definitely reflects the kind of data quality challenges that direct mailers (and their list brokers, printers and agencies) bring to DBM Designs' database marketing services. What are the tasks that usually need to be tackled? Data processing prior to mailing provides address format standardization for proper mail sorting, postal discounts, avoidance of invalid addresses, and removal of wasteful duplicate records from all sources. And with 17% of Americans moving each year, a mailing list check against the National Change of Address (NCOA) database is essential to avoid costly wrong addresses and duplicates. Thorough data processing also helps to detect other data problems, such as missing, incomplete or miscoded customer information, and to create a single-customer view across channels for better segmentation, targeting by channel, and response tracking. For more on the results of the Experian Data Quality study, go to http://www.experian.com/blogs/news/2015/01/29/data-quality-research-study/