More on Direct Mail and the USPS

More on the whole direct mail alive or dead topic . . . Grayhair Software reported in their monthly newsletter that the Post Master General  has declared that not only is the USPS not going out of business — he also stated that it will not be privatized and will continue to play a vital role in the US economy.

According to Grayhair, PMG Donahoe stated:

“. . . we are shaping a bright future for a Postal Service that is better able to serve our customers and the American public. We are radically realigning our mail processing, delivery, and retail networks to create a low-cost, technology-centric delivery platform to serve the nation for generations to come. We are aggressively pursuing product and service innovations to drive business growth and to enable businesses to gain a greater return on their investment in the mail.”

While the USPS is still trying to convince Congress that they should migrate to a 5 day delivery week (no delivery on Saturdays), they’ve definitely got even work to do to become more profitable.

When you look at the services companies like Grayhair offers, you start to see the viability of direct mail when used in concert with the other channels.  For example, if you use Grayhair’s MailTrak Monitoring service, you can track direct mail pieces as they get into the consumers’ mailbox and the response is sent back.  With an integrated approach, you can warm up the arrival of that mail piece with a targeted email message to the consumer or business, then follow up with an email message reminding them that they just received a great offer. Studies have shown that this type of integrated channel approach can boost results significantly.

I’m glad that the USPS is working to become more efficient and that there are companies out there helping them by creating products that increase the efficiency of the direct mail channel. However, I still believe that you’ve got to use multiple marketing channels to really make each direct marketing campaign as successful as possible.

Have a great Halloween Weekend!

Direct Mail and Printing . . . Dead or Alive?

During the last week or so, I’ve been talking to many colleagues whose expertise lies in printing and the enabling of direct mail campaigns.  Things have obviously changed for them — their companies have all either morphed into digital printing agencies or stuck with pure lettershop capabilities depending upon their management teams’ strategic viewpoint.  And certainly we’ve seen a lot in the news about the viability of the US Postal Service in the past year.  The times . . . they are a’changin’ as Bob Dylan put it back in the day.

So, the question is . . . what’s really going to happen to direct mail?  The opinions range all over the spectrum so I was interested to see an article today in BtoB Media Business regarding Ziff Davis and their intention to abandon print next year.  That’s pretty extreme, no?  According to the article, Ziff Davis plans to be the first publisher to “abandon print completely.”  In fact, they intend to be “entirely paperless by January” 2012.

“The future of engagement is mobile, it is social and it is entirely digital,” Steve Weitzner, CEO of Ziff Davis Enterprise, said in a statement. “We intend to drive the digital marketing standard for b-to-b tech media and accelerate the “anywhere and everywhere’ consumption of content by exploiting the rapid adoption of mobile and tablet devices in the IT community.”

This is a pretty extreme position but it should open up the eyes of folks who are still married to a direct mail only approach (if there are any) and get them to wake up and smell the proverbial coffee. Again, the opinions vary widely. . . in talking with a colleague just today, he cited a recently released study by the Winterberry Group that direct mail will be on the rise in the new year.

No matter what you believe one direct marketing principle remains true . . . you need an integrated channel marketing approach to connect with your market segments.  No one channel works alone — and even though Ziff Davis is going paperless — they aren’t going to one channel, they are citing many.  The market is shifting — that is for sure.  But the key point to increasing response and conversion rates is to use the channel that that particular customer or prospect segment likes to be communcated with the most.  And, since none of us have any crystal balls, effectively determining channel preferences means that you have to use an intelligent direct marketing approach — one that takes into consideration testing, analysis and scrutinizing your results.

The great thing about direct marketing is that it is so measurable.  And with online channels, the measurement is even easier and more immediate. This makes it easier to track, tweak and re-test each campaign to really isolate customer preferences.

I hope direct mail isn’t dead — I still enjoy going out to my mail box to see what’s in it.  Although, I do shop online and respond better to email offers.  If you have an opinion on this matter, please share your comments!

 

Capital One Targeting SMB — Fasting Growing Market Segment!

SMB’s are near and dear to our hearts . . . mostly because we have the best coverage — data-wise — to enable our customers to reach them with an integrated, multi-channel marketing approach. We focused in this area because the SMB market is growing more rapidly than any other business segment — and thus are a very attractive market sector to our Fortune 500 Clients.

Case in point . . . financial services giant, Capital One, has created a new suite of credit card offerings aimed at the SMB sector which provide miles and rewards for all of those SMB purchases. According to the MediaPost article:

Business owners looking for travel rewards can opt for the Spark Miles card, which features double miles on every purchase every day, miles that will not expire, and the flexibility to redeem miles for free flights on any airline anytime with no blackout dates. Spark Business also features four other products, including those with attractive low-rate options.

These are some great incentives and will give other card issuers a run for their money! The statistics around SMB are pretty incredible — which is why Capital One is doing this. The article goes on to state:

Small businesses make up 64% of total U.S. job creation, 65% of the global GDP and account for nearly 90% of the world’s workforce, according to The Kauffman Foundation. Small business owners are looking for credit cards that provide value on many different levels, says Michael Wassmer, executive vice president of U.S. Card for Capital One. Besides the rewards, the card also enhances how owners manage their small business, he adds.

As marketers consider their programs to reach this rapidly growing segment, I think this move by Capital One illustrates that the stakes are higher than ever. Marketers will have to find more creative approaches to vie for the SMB market spend. SMB’s are looking for value and I like the idea of incenting them by providing them with rewards that will enable them to take time off and go on vacations. Entrepreneurs tend to work hard and like anyone else, it’s good to be able to play hard when you’re done working.  It’ll be interesting to see how Capital One’s competitors step up and compete with these new offerings.  I think this will net in a win-win scenario for the SMB market.

TGIF!  Have great weekends all!

 

Targeting your Direct Marketing Campaigns for Success

As marketing budgets continue to shrink, really understanding your customers is more important than ever.  And companies, who have been trying to get a handle on organizing data better in order to get a single view of their customers are using this intelligence more and more to create effective and targeted direct marketing campaigns.

A recent PrintWeek article reports on an “informal” survey that Pitney Bowes took during the recent DMA Annual Conference.  The survey results predict increased spending (hooray!) by marketers in creating more personalized direct marketing messages for their customer segments.  In fact, 80% of those surveyed said that they plan to increase their direct/database marketing spend in 2012 — and particularly in the area of customer data integration so that they can maintain and get even a more specific viewpoint of their customer segments.

This is great news for everyone — marketers and customers.  Over the past 10 years there has been a huge push within database marketing to create tools and software that will enable a complete view of the customer.  As Pitney Bowes’ Carol Wallace states:

“Brands for years have been reconciling their data and getting one view of the customer. But as the amount of data grows and as the software becomes a lot more flexible in what it can do, then marketers get more comfortable because they can use that data to be a lot more personal with their customers and become more experimental in the programs they use.”

The bottom line here is that companies can personalize marketing messaging more than ever before to create a compelling story that consumers and businesses will more likely respond to.  While the article references the impact on direct mail, I believe that these technological advances will positively impact all direct marketing channels — and some maybe even more than others.  With the increasing emphasis on mobile marketing, I believe marketers will focus on the personalization of email campaigns — and ensuring that the message can be clearly viewed from a smartphone.

One thing is certain . . . purchasers of products will see more personalized messaging from marketers who are vying for their dollars.  And, marketers will have to be more creative than ever to get their message noticed more than their competitors.

Great B-to-B Marketers Recognized

In the most recent BtoB Magazine, there is an entire section dedicated to the year’s best B2B marketers.  In reading through the profiles and accomplishments of some pretty impressive executives, one recurring idea kept rising to the top of my mind — re-tooling, re-organizing, renewing.

Each of the executives had their own version of the story — and accomplished their goals in different ways.  But the one thing that they did that was absolutely the same was to take a hard look at their organizations with a critical eye and “tease” out the stumbling blocks to the company’s success.  Then — they went about creating change to re-position their companies for the future.

Here are a few quotes to consider:

Scott Coleman, VP-Chief Marketing and Sales Officer at Dupont:  “Any time you have a company that’s been around for 200-plus years, it has to adapt and change over time. We are at that adaptive, critical changing point for DuPont.”

John Kennedy: VP-Corporate Marketing at IBM: “We used our centennial as a way, not so much to talk about IBM, but to talk to our clients and audiences at large about the role IBM is playing in the world and making contributions to the future.”

Deborah Conrad, VP-CMO at Intel: “We’re here to build a better future and to make a better future possible. ‘Sponsors of Tomorrow’ is a way to communicate that.”

Eduardo Conrado, Senior VP-CMO, Motorola Solutions: “When we launched our ‘rise’ campaign, we wanted to re-position Motorola Solutions as a very vertically focused government and enterprise technology company with a solutions orientation–meeting customer needs.”

There are many more marketing executives featured in the article (BtoB’s Best Marketers).  I highly recommend reading it.  It really talks to the changing economic environment and how large companies are re-tooling to be as relevant as possible to their customers today.  The other important theme is that most of these executives are bullish on the future — they are very optimistic in their comments.

It’s always nice to end the week on a positive note! Have a great weekend.

 

Email Marketing Stats — All Good!

Email marketing is continuing to thrive and MailerMailer has just published some interesting statistics about the effectiveness of email marketing.  Check out these great stats!

• As of May, 2011, email marketing had an average return on investment of $43.52 for every dollar spent. This is expected to reach $44.25 by the end of 2011.
  –Direct Marketing Association
• Investments made in email marketing will grow from $1.3 billion in 2010 to $2 billion by 2014.
  –Forrester Research
• In early 2011, 72% of respondents answered that Return-of-Investment (ROI) of their email marketing campaigns is excellent or really good.
  –Econsultancy
• 39.4% of marketing industry executives called Email Marketing the most powerful advertising channel for their business.
  –Datran Media survey
• 63% of respondents would like to increase spending on email marketing in 2011.
  -BtoBMarketing
• 70% of brand marketers planned to make investments in email marketing in 2011.
  -Society of Digital Agencies

These are some pretty compelling statistics.  As usual, we recommend an integrated channel marketing approach — as opposed to putting all of your marketing budget into one channel for the greatest response and conversion rates.  However, what these statistics represent is an enthusiastic thumbs-up for using the email channel to increase your direct marketing effectiveness.

Thanks again to MailerMailer for putting these statistics together!

The Changing World of Direct Marketing

Last week I attended my ump-teenth DMA conference in Boston.  As usual, it was an interesting event.  Say what you will about direct marketers but they are a resilient and positive group — that is for certain.  And their ability to party for days on end always amazes me.

The most interesting part of this particular DMA was the star of this show — mobile marketing.  There were more mobile marketing booths than even social media booths.  And there were more of both of these categories than printers and lettershops — although the USPS still had quite a large booth there.

What is so compelling about mobile marketing is that it simply takes the traditional channels of direct marketing (postal, telemarketing and email) and delivers the message to the mobile phone instead of the mail box or computer.  This makes sense – after all, experts have estimated that by the end of this year there will be more smart phones sold then televisions and computers combined!

The other nice thing about mobile marketing is all of the other businesses that it is spawning.  For example, mobile application development is growing like gangbusters.  Also, creative designers who can design messages specifically to be easily read on the mobile handset are definitely sought after professionals.  We can all relate to this because we (like everyone else in society) spend a lot of time interacting with our mobile hand-helds each and every day.  Have you ever left your mobile phone in the office by accident when you headed out for lunch?  It’s quite the unsettling feeling, isn’t it?

So, another successful DMA conference!  I’m looking forward to following up with all of the contacts that I met there.  And, most of all, I’m looking forward to keeping an eye peeled for new and exciting technology and ideas coming from all of the mobile marketers that I met in Boston.