Direct Mail Marketing News

If you don’t know what your customers want, marketing to them can be like fishing without any bait.

To send highly targeted postcards you have to at least generally know how they think and what offers are most likely to resonate with them. How else are you going to know which offers are most likely to turn into sales?

Remember, the key to great postcard campaigns is data, offer, and then design (the DOD method), and if you’re stuck on the offer part, don’t despair. There’s a shortcut.

The trident marketing method can save you.

The trident method is when you expand your marketing offer to include multiple offers (usually three). If normal postcard marketing is like fishing with a spear, this is like fishing with a three-pointed trident. With more points, you have a better chance of catching something valuable (like a customer).

Additionally, by going broad with your messaging, you give yourself a higher chance of getting responses which allows you to learn more about your consumers and what offers prompt them to purchase so that you can be more targeted in the future.

It makes sense to use multiple offers in these 3 scenarios:

• You’re testing a new market
• You’re testing new products
• You’re testing new pricing

Here are some examples of how you can pull it off:

Let’s say that you’re a contractor who has always focused on building new homes, but you want to expand into pools and gazebos. You are, in effect, testing a new product in a new market, and so it makes sense to go broad with your message before you learn more about your customer and narrow it down. Place several offers on your postcard, like so to see if there’s an appetite for your new services:

Or, let’s say that you’re a financial planner who’s expanding their territory to a neighboring city. You want to reach out to people there, but you’re not sure if the same language and messaging will land with them. Try several calls to action:

Or, let’s say your landscaping business wants to start experimenting with premium maintenance services. Instead of sending out a single postcard with a newer, higher price and possibly confusing and alienating some of your current customer base, add new, higher pricing tier offers on top of your normal ones to see who will bite.

And that’s it! The difficult part is over. Design and send your postcard with the trident offer and when responses start to trickle in, keep careful track of which of the multiple offers were more interesting to your customers. Use that information to inform your next postcard send, and keep optimizing for a higher and higher ROI!

Need a little help? Call Opportunity Knocks at 1 (866) 319-7109; they can design those trident offers for you!

Or, ready to just get your own postcard campaign out the door? Log into our web-to-print platform.

Direct mail is all about the targeting.

While you may never know who opens your emails, visits your website, or clicks on your online ad, you can guarantee that when someone receives your postcard, they read it. It’s a brilliant hand-held billboard that they can’t help but glance at, and with USPS tracking, you know precisely when it arrives.

But, (and it’s a big but) for them to take action on that postcard, you have to be sending the right message to the right person. That’s the role of targeting.

In order to come up with the right message and the right recipient, you’ll need to look no further than your current or potential clients. As much as you think you know about them, you’ll find that there’s always more, and the more you know the more your business can grow.

Kick it all off by asking the right questions.

Existing Clients

If you have clients, start here. Reach out to them to gain some perspective on what’s working and what needs to be changed. If they’re not thrilled with the service, it’s very likely that you’ll have trouble attracting and keeping more of them. If they are, you know exactly what you need to be advertising to the others.

It would be wise to start with your best and longest standing customers, but make sure that they feel comfortable being honest with you. Here are the questions to ask them:

1. In what ways do you use our product (or service)?
2. What problem has it solved for you?
3. What similar products have you tried, and how do we compare?
4. What is the most useful feature of our product for your purposes?
5. What is the least useful?
6. In what ways would you improve our product?

From this, you’ll better understand their use-case which informs your marketing message. You may find answers that surprise you, and can help you reach a market you may not have considered before. For example, a landscaper client of ours learned through this process that many real estate agents in his area needed help manicuring yards for sale, and began advertising to them on this basis.

Once you understand the problems your product solves, you can start shaping your message to suit a market with those needs.

Potential Clients

Now that you understand how your product is used, you can start looking for new clients.  To find them, you’ll want to start reaching out to your test markets and asking:

1. What problems do you currently need to solve?
2. What products or services are you currently using to solve those problems?
3. What issues do you face with your current solution?
4. Who are the decision makers in your family or company?
5. What budget constraints do you face?

While collecting these answers, you will want to group your respondents by demographics, and look for trends that are specific to each group. In doing so, you will be able to understand how different demographic factors impact a clients’ needs. This will help you shape each marketing message effectively and pointedly.

Once you’ve collected all this data, there’s nothing left to do but put it into action. You can use our web-to-print platform to design a new offer based off a tried-and-true template and target your ideal customer!

Here are your targeting options:

• Map My Mail: Draw an area on Google Maps using tax assessor data.
• Demographic Search: Choose from hundreds of data choices and in-depth property information.
• Psychographic Search (Powered by Nielsen PRIZM): Understand your customer at a deeper level by choosing pre-selected personas who match your ideal customer.
• Upload your own list!

Need marketing advice? Our agents have seen it all and would love to share what they know. Just call 1 (877) 222-6010!

Or, if you need someone to handle it all for you, Opportunity Knocks can act as an extension of your team to attract customers. Call them at 1 (866) 319-7109 and start the conversation!

Knowing your ROI is everything

Everyone (ourselves included) calls it “direct” mail marketing. Why is it direct?

Well, it’s certainly not because the postcards go directly to your customer’s doors – they all do that. Where else would they go? And it’s not “direct” because of the style of communication we prefer to use – although direct and concise is pretty much always better.

No, it’s called “direct” because that’s a shortened version of “direct-response.” That is to say, when someone receives a postcard, you get a direct response. And if they reply to it, you know so, and you can track which campaign it came from.

The response is direct and immediate.

What makes direct marketing like this so incredibly different? It’s that it lets you track your ROI, of course!

When direct marketing like this tells you what works and what doesn’t you know A, how much money you made and B, how to optimize to improve your campaigns. Eventually you reach a point where you know exactly which audience will buy, what message resonates best with them, and that for every $1 you put in, you get $3.27 back.

Contrast this with all other types of marketing like branding, advertising, radio spots, and billboards where you have no idea what the ROI is. Heck, you don’t even know if people heard it. You just have to trust that it reached people and that they’ll remember you the next time they need a roofer, a plumber, a dentist, or an architect. For these types of marketing, it’s a guess.

With direct marketing on the other hand, your expenditure is an investment.

Here’s how our customers measure their direct mail ROI:

1. Run a postcard campaign

You can use one of our tried-and-true templates in our web-to-print tool to design the whole thing in about fifteen minutes (or re-use a past campaign) and select a target audience. You can include an offer code like “DIRECTMAIL12” which is different for each campaign. Hit “send.”

2. Your postcards are delivered

Over a period of 2-3 weeks your campaign goes out through the USPS. Every piece of mail is certified and tracked so that you can come back and check our website and see that they’ve all gone out. (Our tracking rate is 100% and our guaranteed delivery rate is always higher than 92%).

3. You start to hear back

For every postcard that people respond to, they’ll follow your call to action to visit your website, call on the phone, or walk into the store. When they make a purchase, you and your employees will ask how they found you – if they reference the “DIRECTMAIL12” offer code, you know precisely where it came from.

4. Do a little simple math

Wait until 30 days after the campaign is over. From here, calculating your ROI is easy. Divide the number of respondents by the total number of postcards that were sent.

Let’s say that 1000 responded out of 10,000 postcards sent, so a 10% response rate. You can expect that this will be your rate in the future, given similar campaigns to similar targets.

Now, divide the revenue that you got from the campaign, let’s say $6,540 on a spend of $2,000. That’s a 327% return on investment.

And mind you, that’s only after 30 days. Some sales will continue to creep in overtime as people finally take action. Experts call this the long-tail ROI effect because your ROI always continues to grow. For simplicity however, we only measure after 30 days and move on to the next campaign.

And there you have it! Direct mail means “direct-response” which is how you measure campaigns against each other to figure out which ones deliver the greatest ROI. This is how you move your marketing from being a cost, like radio-spots and billboards, to being an investment with a guaranteed outcome.

Ready to test your own ROI? Log in and send a campaign today!

Or, if you need help, Call Opportunity Knocks at 1 (866) 319-7109 and they’ll set your campaigns up for you!

The best way to stay top of mind

It may sound greedy, but you want all of the customer attention that you can get.

If you think about your customers in terms of the problems that you solve for them, they spend very little actual time looking for and engaging with your products or services. If you’re a dentist, you help them clean their teeth perhaps twice a year. A handyman? You might repair appliances maybe every two years. And as a landscaper? Tree trimmings occur even less frequently.

In the in-between time, you basically have no business reaching out to these people.

And yet, the key to great marketing is to stay in touch so that when they do have that problem, you’re the one that’s top of mind. That means that you’ve got to find a way to be noticed all the time, and the best way to do that is to be helpful.

What sort of strategy helps you do this?

Let us introduce our good friend content marketing

Content marketing is the idea that you can participate in all parts of your customer’s life, not just the times when they most need you. You do it by creating helpful content that they enjoy and want to read – something that’s either interesting or helpful. Great examples include Home Depot, who offers basic woodworking classes in its stores, REI, which offers group outdoors trips, and not to be too self-promotional, but ProspectsPLUS, which publishes a bi-weekly SMB marketing advice blog. None of them are making any money off of these endeavors but they are building trust by being helpful.

This sort of strategy does generate revenue in the long run however because when folks need 2×4’s, a new sleeping bag, or more customers, they know precisely where to go.

How can you leverage content marketing in your own business?

#1 Choose a Topic

The best way to do this is to start defining your customer personas. Who is your typical customer? Where do they live? How much do they make? Do they have kids? Here’s an example of one:

Jane: age 41, Des Moines IA, employed full time in sales, married, two toddlers

Now, map out the things that Jane does. What could she possibly need help with?

• Commutes to work
• Manages house finances
• Works a time-intensive job
• Occasionally makes dinners
• Raising two kids

Among those things, is there something that you’re an expert at that you could help her with? Choose something that’s tangentially related to your business, and then proceed to step #2.

#2 Choose a Channel

What’s the best way to communicate that message? Your options are:

• Printed newsletter
• Blog
• Email newsletter
• Postcard series

The best strategy of course is to mix several of these and use them to promote each other: Your newsletter should reference your blog, your postcards should reference your newsletter, and your emails should send out links to new blog posts. That being said, don’t bite off more than you can chew and start small, then build up.

Once you’ve selected the place that you think Jane will be most receptive to receiving your friendly help, get to work writing about topics that you think she’d want to hear! Remember to keep them focused on delivering value and not on pitching your services. If people sense that you’re doing this because you want something from them, they’ll quickly opt-out. This can happen if you fill your newsletter with updates about you rather than helpful tips for her.

Start sending!

After this, it’s all about building your base of subscribers. It’s key to constantly test messages, interview customers to see what they’d love to hear about, and optimize for the greatest possible readership.

Do this and you’ll have successfully created a content marketing strategy that monopolizes your customers’ attention in the most helpful way!

Need help with this? Call Opportunity Knocks at 1 (866) 319-7109; they can create custom graphics and plan it all out for you!

Want to get a trial postcard campaign out the door? Log into our web-to-print platform and do it yourself!

First off, do you know how Black Friday started?

Here’s how the urban myth goes: The day after Thanksgiving was the day of the year when retailers finally turned an annual profit. Because their accounting was kept in ledgers which at the time used red ink to denote loses and black to note profits, it was termed “Black Friday.” Everything was finally “in the black.”

Sounds reasonable, right?

Only, this version of the story is from the 1980’s. The actual term dates back to a century earlier.

“Black” is an ancient term used to describe calamities, such as the original Black Friday of 1869 when a gold-buying scheme by two wealthy financiers caused the entire US stock market to crash. It was total bedlam in New York’s streets. Nearly a century later, police in Philadelphia commented on the chaotic shopping scene that had evolved on the Friday following Thanksgiving and dubbed it “Black Friday” because they had to work double-overtime to control the crowds.

The name stuck.

Nowadays, Black Friday has a much more positive spin: it’s a day for great deals. It will always, however, harken back to an insatiable wave of people going wild in the streets. Perhaps, with some tips, we can help you take the term back to its roots this year to bring a throng of crazed shoppers crashing through your doors too!

Here are our top 11 Black Friday selling tips:

1. Make it known that you’ll participate

First and foremost, not everyone participates. Outdoor retail giant REI ran a campaign last year boycotting the event (#optoutside) and has gathered hundreds of brands behind it, including Subaru and Google. If only we all had the revenue to abstain from one of the biggest shopping bonanzas of the year, huh? If you do plan to participate, advertise that fact and let people know that you’ll be open!

How can you get the word out? If you want to reach as many people as possible, try a Market Dominator postcard campaign that targets your entire zip code.

2. Publish your hours

Along with letting people know that you’ll be open, let them know when. Many shoppers get their start at 4 am and if that’s a little aggressive for you, let them know what they can expect. It doesn’t hurt you to be their second or third stop if it means a little extra sleep.

3. Leak your ads early

This is a publicity stunt to be sure, but it’s an effective one: If you have a mailing list or a decent number of website visitors, run your Black Friday ads now and then retract them. Publicly apologize that the campaign wasn’t meant to go up yet, and that the deals were meant to be kept a secret. This will generate excitement and those that only saw the apology will go looking for the ads and become intrigued.

So many big retailers do this that the financial website NerdWallet dedicates a page to them.

4. Early bird freebies

This is a common practice and an all-around savvy move. Only a few people will ever redeem the prizes but many hundreds will show up trying to claim them and odds are, they’ll purchase something while they’re there. Last year Cabela’s gave away BBQs, Fandango gave away movie tickets, and Walmart gave away … deodorant? Perhaps this was to make sweaty shoppers more bearable for their staff.

5. Sell both in store and online

Cyber Monday, Black Friday’s online cousin, emerged as ecommerce’s answer to post Thanksgiving deals, but now the two have blended together. Whether you sell online, in-store, or both, give your customers the same experience everywhere so that you can …

6. Prepare for savvy smartphone users

Customers expect an omnichannel experience. That is, they want you to recognize them as the same individual when they show up in person, on their computer, on their phone, and across all channels. Make sure that your web experience and prices match the in-store one because customers will not only hold it against you but they’ll also price-shop your competitors while standing in your store. Prepare your employees with the power to discount and answer these types of questions.

7. Arrange the most desirable advertised goods in the back

This is a classic supermarket store-stocking tactic, and it’s the reason that to get to produce, dairy, and meats in any supermarket, you have to walk to the three farthest corners. This forces you to see and smell everything else as you go. Along the way, you pile more in your cart. Take a page out of their book and place your most advertised items in the back.

8. Drop the price on desirable items as lures

One of the best ways to create word of mouth buzz about your Black Friday sale is to price a few things so low as to be impossible for people not to share. What if you offered microwaves for $1? Or a set of tires for $0.99? That’s so low that people can’t help but talk about it and spread the word. To preserve your margin however, offer them in …

9. Limited Quantities

Scarcity is the number-one psychological trigger that convinces people to buy on the spot. We all fear missing out on things and if you combine jaw-droppingly low prices at extremely limited quantities, you’re going to convince people to visit you first to capture the deal.

10. Create a line

Ever see a bunch of people outside of the Apple store and suddenly realize that a new iPhone just launched? Now, Apple could stock enough employees, open up stands outside, or find some way to sell them faster than in-person, but they choose not to. Why? Because lines create exclusivity! People want things that others want and if the line is so long that it’s down the block, others are going to feel left out and they’ll want in too. If you can manage it, hire someone to control the flow of traffic to give the impression that everyone in town is at your store right now.

11. Use offer codes to track your ads

Here at ProspectsPLUS we’re big believers in direct-response marketing. If you can’t track it and measure your ROI, it’s not good marketing. That’s why we highly recommend including unique offer codes on all of your postcard marketing campaigns in the run up to Black Friday so that you can calculate which ones brought in the most revenue and optimize for next year!

Black Friday is fast approaching – time to get to work

Unlike its historical ancestor, the Black Friday of today is a revenue boon.  It’s a terrific opportunity for you to demonstrate your marketing chops! Try a few of these campaigns and bring the crowds crashing through your doors.

Quick – give us a call at 1 (877) 222-6010 or log in and launch your postcards today.

Forget the tactics. Need a strategy? Opportunity Knocks has your back – give them a call at 1 (866) 319-7109 and they’ll put your plan in order!

For a regrettable number of business owners, the answer to this question is to throw their hands up in the air and to assume that it just won’t work for them. Perhaps they’ve tried creating a website, tried sending out emails, or tried postcard marketing, didn’t get enough replies, and now feel turned off to the entire process.

That’s a shame, because you know how an expert small business marketer would take that news?

They’d be elated! Yeah, as in “ecstatically happy,” because they know that feedback is the only way they’re going to eventually make it work.  Or as Thomas Edison once said,

 “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

Every marketing campaign that doesn’t work is just another lesson in what not to do, and after enough of these (you’ll have plenty over the course of running your business), you’ll narrow in on what does.

You can isolate and test different factors of your campaign, for example perhaps you chose one phrase over another. Next time, you can A/B test them. Perhaps you chose the bright red image rather than the bright blue one. Next time, switch them up.

Test everything, but just don’t test too many factors at once – do it one at a time so that you know precisely what the winning change was.

3 ways that you can test your campaigns

Now, just because you’re about to experiment doesn’t mean that you have to make someone else’s mistakes too. Here’s what we’ve learned over the past few million postcard sends that you can test, using our DOD method.

1. Data – try targeting different people

If you don’t yet have an extremely clear sense of who your target audience is, perhaps you’re going after the wrong one. Companies make this mistake all the time, and they confuse their end-users with their actual purchasers. A full 59% of women, for example, feel compelled to buy clothes for their partners, and any ads targeted at those men who have (as the article alleges) “given up” on their appearance would be completely wasted. Similarly, any car ads targeted at first-time drivers would be completely missing who actually pays the price.

Try switching up your targeting. If you were very specific, try being more broad. If you were broad, go specific. Mix it up and test just the audience.

2. Offer – try offering something different

Perhaps you know your target audience well, and that they come into your store and buy from you all the time. In this case, it’s probably the offer that’s falling flat and needs to be pumped back up. Is what you’re offering phrased well? Were you concise or are the words too flowery or rambling? Or did you forget to include the almighty call-to-action?

Mix up the offer and see if something else sticks.

3. Design – try changing the design

If you’re certain that you’re targeting and your offer were on-point but you still didn’t get your results, it might be the design. Visual cues are everything and studies show that your brain processes images about 60,000 times faster than text. If your images are bad, it could be that they’re turning people off to your postcard before they even know why.

Follow our guide to supercharging your images and try a few of these effects!

Put it to the test!

What do you suspect is your marketing issue? Change that one thing and keep sending, each time tweaking one factor on your original postcard. Include unique offer codes on each so that you can track the results and when one of them hits, double down and send more of those!

Expert small business marketers know that marketing that doesn’t work is their training ground to develop marketing that does!

When you’re ready, call us at 1 (877) 222-6010 and we’ll send that postcard!

Could you use an expert hand?

Opportunity Knocks are marketing experts and they can diagnose why things aren’t working and get you back on track in one phone call: 1 (866) 319-7109

Wait, we’re confused. Is our headline today baking advice? Dating advice? Actually, it’s a foundational principle of good marketing.

Ever heard of a lizard brain? Well, you have one. It’s a section of your brain called the amygdala, also known as the “primitive brain,” that’s known for its quick, knee-jerk reactions and fight-or-flight responses. This is where gut-reactions come from.

These gut reactions happen a lot faster than we realize – usually in under three seconds. This makes them tens of thousands of times faster than your normal thinking mind.

It’s basically the result of spending tens of thousands of years as a species trying to quickly identify danger – if a bush rustles, we jump. If we see certain colors, we love or feel anxious.

Because of this, your lizard brain is the first line of defense against all incoming messages, aka any kind of marketing.

If you’re going to be successful at bringing in new customers, you’re going to have to put on your neuroscience cap and learn to speak to it!

Here’s some advice for speaking to the gut and not the brain:

1. Use powerful images

Your brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. That’s right, you came up with a reaction to the picture of this article that much faster than you registered the title.

The same research also shows that while we process text much slower, using both pictures and text is the ultimate winning combination to drive home your message and make it stick. You hit the reader with imagery and then provide intellectual rationale.

The lesson for your marketing should be crystal clear: Choose better images and combine them with text! Those images should be arresting, that is to say, they should have high contrast, intense colors, and stand out from their environment (the rest of their mail).

2. Use emotion

Right next to the part of the brain that processes images is the area that processes emotions. It’s a quick leap from sight to feeling, and those emotions are processed 5x faster than the conscious thoughts that follow.

Thus when it comes to making a good first marketing impression, 62-90% of our feeling about a brand can come simply from the emotion that the color used evokes.

Which one do you associate with in your marketing?

Red – sense of urgency, encourages appetite

Blue – reliability

Yellow – dependability (but sometimes anxiety)

Orange – optimism and expression

Green – tranquility, nature

Purple – wisdom and respect

Black – authority

Gray – practicality

(You can log into the web-to-print platform and choose a stock image to create a color-powered postcard now)

3. Use smiling people

Another powerful universal feature of our brains is their ability to recognize human faces. This only makes sense, as recognizing other people and building relationships has been key to our evolutionary survival. Babies are born with this ability and the emotional center of our brain lights up in a unique way when we see them.

It’s thus that using happy, smiling people in your postcard marketing is not too unlike greeting them happily in person. Here are great examples:

Address your next mailing to “the lizard brain”

Next time you’re marketing, who are you trying to appeal to? The lizard brain! It processes everything faster and it prefers communication via images, color, emotions, and faces. If you can combine all of these elements into an advertising or print campaign, you’re going to be off to the races on ROI.

Click here to get your own mailing out now

If you’ve got marketing that needs doing, why not let us lend a hand? Call Opportunity Knocks at 1 (866) 319-7109 and well get you set up with a psychologically-powered campaign series today!

If all you do is read the first sentence of this article, remember data, offer, design (DOD), in that order.

What does it all mean? These terms are the keys behind every highly successful postcard campaign that we see come through the presses, including one that recently delivered $40,000 for one of our customers within just one week. (This came from 30-45 minutes of work, we might add. We can’t even start to do the math on that ROI.)

Remembering these principles thus ensures that your offers get to the right people, say the right things, and look the right way in order to capture leads and customers. Do it any other way, or heaven forbid mix them up, and you risk wasting postcards and precious marketing dollars with dud offers.

Ready to learn how the 3-secret system works?
Let’s dive in.

1. Data

As David Ogilvy, grandfather of modern advertising, once said, “Don’t count the people that you reach, reach the people that count.” In direct mail marketing, this couldn’t be more true because 100% of your poorly targeted postcards are wasted. The problem is that you don’t ever really know which half that is, and thus you can’t do anything about it. Typically.

If you’re using a direct mail platform that leverages state of the art technology however, it becomes a different story. Our partners are out there collecting every drop of information you could want to know about your prospects – do they have a credit card? Do they drive a car? Do they have young children? All of this is placed at  your fingertips through ProspectsPLUS’s web-to-print platform.

The provider of this is Nielsen’s PRIZM, which makes your job easier by just allowing you to select profiles  of your ideal customers.

With the data piece of things taken care of, you cut out the vast majority of wasted postcards and target just those who are ready to buy.

2. Offer

Once you’re focused on the right people, it’s all about what you say! Delivering the right message to the right audience is critical, as personalized offers increase sales opportunities by as much as 20%. Personalization is so powerful in fact that it’s responsible for 1/3 of Amazon’s revenue and 75% of Netflix’s movie rentals.

Nielsen’s PRIZM put’s this same power in your hands via postcards and when you know precisely who you’re writing to, you can get much more specific.

Start off the postcard addressing the recipient by first name to grab their attention (just like we do with our emails). Next, talk about what you can do for them and not what they can do for you. Drop the “We’re a contractor who’s been in business 40 years…” intro and tell them how they’ll feel once they buy from you.

Make the message relevant to their household or industry by peppering in specific jargon that you know will resonate. If they’re a homeowner talk about local landmarks. If they’re in construction, talk about well-known job sites. Ensure that they feel like they’re reading a letter from someone who understands their neighborhood or industry.

Include the 5 W’s: 

Who are you to them?

What is being offered?

When will the offer expire?

Where can it be redeemed?

Why is it important that they act now?

How do they reach you?

3. Design 

This comes third, but is still extremely important as it determines whether your card is picked up and read or not.

The best design is a high quality photo of one of your customers enjoying your product or service, and the emotions that go with it: excitement, relief, joy. If the photo is grainy or too small, go with a stock image photo. Make sure that it’s bright, powerful, and attention grabbing, and that your call to action (CTA) is displayed prominently and in a different color!

Example:

All set to go!

What are you going to remember from today? Data, offer, design. DOD. Now the next time that you’re thinking that you need more customers, you know exactly where and how to get started: just log into the ProspectsPLUS web-to-print platform which will walk you through those precise steps to get your marketing out into the world where it can land you more customers!

If you’re ready to be done for the day, give one of our experts a call at 1 (877) 222-6010 and let’s get you set up!

Need a little extra help?

Call Opportunity Knocks at 1 (866) 319-7109 to get help setting it all up so that it runs without you even thinking about it!

Responses don’t mean jack.

That’s not to say that they don’t matter – they do let you know that things are happening and that people are responding, but this is only activity. Thinking that a campaign was successful because you got a bunch of responses is like celebrating your victory only halfway through a race.

While you’re cheering, your competitors are still sprinting ahead.

And if none of your respondents end up buying anything, or if they did buy but weren’t profitable, then it wasn’t a success. What truly matters is ROI.

Today we’ll explore a few scenarios where responses did not lead to ROI and how you can avoid the
same mistakes.

Here are 3 times that responses did not equate to ROI, and what they can do differently:

1. The wrong people responded

Sometimes people just want to talk. That was one of our client’s realizations when they sent out a postcard campaign that saw a nearly 40% response rate. People of all socioeconomic strata and a great variety of backgrounds and professions took the time to hand-write responses to their postcards – many of them in monogrammed envelopes and some of them even several pages long. As the mail flooded in, our client at first thought it was too good to be true!

In this case it was. What all these leads shared in common was that they were all retired. Our client had sent a postcard campaign to an area of California with a high density of retirement communities and nursing homes and very few (if any) of these letters denoted real buying interest. Many of them politely declined, but then proceeded on a different topic. They simply wanted to talk.

The simple solution? Better targeting. With digital printing technology you can see this coming – you know where each of your postcards are going and you can adapt for next time to focus on only your ideal customers.

2. The wrong customers bought

Some customers are more demanding than others. One B2B client of ours discovered this in their mass postcard campaigns designed to open up a large, untouched segment of price-sensitive customers. Their three-touch postcard series worked, and they started to sign on more and more of these clients – the responses were there and the revenue was there. These clients paid. But they also took.

They took, well, just about everything that they could get their hands on. These smaller customers had smaller teams, and their owners were stretched thin on resources to begin with, so they leaned heavily on our client’s open promise for unlimited support and clogged the phone lines day and night. In response, they were forced to hire more support staff to keep up.

In the end, this was a money-losing proposition. Why? Because they reached the wrong customers! Generally, the larger the clients, the less hand-holding they’ll need, and with ProspectsPLUS’s targeting systems you can make sure that you’re only going after clients who are going to bring in the big bucks.

3. The offer wasn’t mutually beneficial

This last one came the closest to being successful – they got the high volume of consumer responses that they wanted, from people who might have been the right people, but in the end, their offer came back to bite them. This customer installs curtains, and they offered a $50 gift card to anyone who scheduled a home consultation using their postcard offer code. The phones positively rang off the hook.

The only problem? When their sales reps stopped by, they were met with open doors but blank stares. No amount of free advice or decorating expertise could get them un-stuck from their avid desire for the gift card. Many people who otherwise would have been great leads were so fixated on the free gift that they paid no attention to the consultation and the sales conversions languished in the single digits.

The solution? Predicate your offers on some sort of a give-get! Make your rebates applicable after some sort of a purchase or you’ll get a flood of well-meaning people who want free things but who were never going to buy to begin with.

Ready to get some ROI on your responses?

Responses, as you can see, are not everything. They’re an indicator, a mile marker that lets you know that you’re on the right track. What really matters however is new customers and your ROI, which needs to factor in not only what it cost to acquire those customers, but what it cost to maintain them.

And there you have it, all of the warning you’ll need to make ROI your primary focus! Get out there and fire off your postcard campaigns with confidence today knowing that you properly targeted your audiences.

Need a little help getting the right people to buy?

Sometimes it’s great to run your plan by someone, and that’s why Opportunity Knocks is here. They’re experts in more than direct mail – they’ll consult you on your entire marketing strategy and then run it for you! Give them a call at 1 (866) 319-7109 to see what you can accomplish together.