What does a brand manager have that a direct marketing manager doesn't?
Time.
Most advertisers know that brand building is a gradual process, that they may have to invest years—slowly building awareness and steadily improving the perception of a company, its products and services—before seeing significant ROI.
Direct marketers, on the other hand, do not live in this wait-and-see world. A week, maybe two, after a campaign drops, the verdict is in. And if that campaign appears not to be working, it either gets fixed, pronto, or the DM agency—and perhaps even the DM manager—gets fired.
To avoid being shown the door, the DM manager needs to know how to swiftly solve direct marketing's most common and costly problems. Hence this article.
Missing your response, cost per acquisition, cost per lead or ROI financial targets?
The first place to seek a solution is your offer strategy. Do that by asking these questions:
- Have you committed DM's most common sin: trying to tell too much?
- Have you tried to accommodate the product manager by selling the features of your product instead of focusing on the benefits of your offer?
- Do you have an offer that is so compelling, so unique, and so valuable that a reader is going to stop dead in his tracks and respond, right now?
A simple enhancement for a weak offer would be to add value through aggregation of content. Create an online resource center equipped with guides, business value tools, Web seminar archives, and links to other resources.
Then, in your demand-generation campaigns, sell the value, exclusivity, and time-saving benefits of visiting your center. Leverage the value of the center to support your search engine, email, and direct mail campaigns.
Trust me, a unique resource center makes for a unique and compelling offer.
Another source of your problem could be targeting:
- Are you trying to reach too many targets to hit your quantity goals?
- Have you skipped the important step of looking at your data carefully and finding ways to get rid of trash records?
One of the fastest and least expensive methods to improve your results is to eliminate poor targets and increase the number of look-alike suspects.
Here is a simple exercise to perform when putting together a lead generation mailing: Have your data-processing vendor run a count, by title, of your mailing list. At the same time, run a count of your customer titles.
Now, compare the results. How many of the titles in your suspect mailing list are not in your customer file? How many titles like "administrator," "consultant," and, yes, even "inmate" have somehow slipped into your mailing list—people who will respond for the sake of it, but never, ever buy your product?
While you're at it, run an analysis on the number of contacts at a given address. Then determine whether you are mailing too many pieces to that address on the same day, which makes it simple for the mailroom to identify and trash multiple copies of your precious communication. Often, trickling your campaigns into large corporations will get better results than one large delivery.
Is Sales screaming for leads?
Salespeople love to receive a nice steady flow of leads that keeps them busy, but not too busy. When that's not what you're giving them, they tend to become, well, verbal.
Meanwhile, Marketing gets so excited about the next new campaign that it spends three months getting everything ready to go, and then fires all of its guns at once—advertising, email, e-newsletters, Web events, and lead-generation direct mail—resulting in an impressive surge of response.
Whereupon, the sales force, which has been twiddling its thumbs while Marketing was doing its thing, finds itself unable to handle the sudden surge.
So what does Sales do? It cherry-picks the best leads, letting the surplus responses fall to the floor to rot. Within 45 days, they're yelling for "fresh" leads.
The solution to this particular problem is typically found in improved program implementation and management, as well as improved offer strategy.
Start off by determining the maximum number of responses Telesales and Field Sales can handle. Then, back that number down by 20% to allow for less-than-optimum performance. Once you have your maximum lead projections and estimated response rates, you can schedule your campaign rollouts on a weekly or daily basis to avoid blackouts or brownouts.
If you've already taken those steps and you're not generating enough leads to keep Sales's stomach from growling, that's when your offer strategy comes into play.
Determine how deep into the buying cycle you need to be generating your leads. Do you need to soften your offer to get inquiries at an earlier stage? Are you, for example, using a whitepaper offer or trend study, when an appointment-setter offer or business-need-assessment offer would be more effective at generating qualified leads? Think about it.
Is Sales protesting that your leads are junk?
Never satisfied, are they? Assuming that Sales is correct in its assessment, I'd suggest four places to seek the source of the problem: targeting, filtering, offer structure, and analysis.
If targeting is the culprit, you may want to reduce your promotional quantities and tighten up the targeting to strictly encompass the right functional titles within the right size companies—in other words, those with the greatest potential for moving smartly down the sales funnel.
Compare your suspect records to your customer records, and remove those that are unwanted. And consider testing a campaign that employs a title slug to ensure that your message gets delivered to the person in charge of your product area. Sample slugs: "To the person in charge of email system management," or "To the person in charge of employee morale."
The second avenue to better lead quality is via the filtering and qualification process that precedes the distribution of leads to Sales. Remember, Sales would rather have one great opportunity—one who is ready to talk business—than 10 inquiries who are uncertain about their need and time frame.
So, whether those inquires are being generated by email or telemarketing, you'll get less bellyaching if you're verifying each respondent's need, readiness, and level of interest in discussing a solution before handing that lead off to Sales.
If you collect names at trade shows, whatever you do don't call them leads and don't distribute them... not until you've sent an email to these people that goes something like this:
We got your name at the recent XYZ trade show. What would you like us to do with it? Please check one of the following:
- Keep your name in the drawing for the grand prize
- Send you information on our product
- Contact you right away to discuss how ABC company could help solve your business problems
- All of the above
- None of the above
Now for your offer structure. The deeper you drive a prospect into the sales funnel, the closer you bring that prospect to contact with a sales person. Offers tailored to these later stages may generate less response, but the respondents you do get will have a higher interest level and Sales will love both them and you.
So you'll want to try consideration and evaluation offers such as gift-with-appointment, product demonstration, RFP developers, or ROI calculators.
The final approach to lead-quality improvement is through quantifiable analysis of the responses.
Too many times the squawking from Sales is based on one lousy sample. Sales may have 10 prospects to follow up on, but when the first call goes poorly they assume the other nine will go just as poorly as the first.
I consistently urge DM managers to conduct a "Did You Buy?" survey against all leads on a continual 90-day rotation basis.
If you ask the following questions of respondents—via email, over the phone, or through the post, you have a fast, simple, and affordable way to determine the financial value of your sales pipeline and the ROI of your marketing activities:
- Did a sales representative contact you?
- How would you rate your experience?
- Were all your questions answered?
- Did you buy the product about which you inquired?
- If so, from whom?
- If so, how much did you invest?
- If you did not buy, do you plan to purchase in the future?
- When do you plan to purchase?
- How much do you estimate you will invest in this purchase?
- Would you like to be contacted to discuss your needs now?
Are your prospects converting to customers with glacial speed?
This is one of the direct marketer's most frustrating problems, because it's not the least bit easy to solve. After all, you can push and drive a prospect through her buying process only as fast as she, or her organization, is willing to go. Accelerating conversion requires that you answer all of that buyer's questions—not to mention all of the questions of her cadre of decision influencers—at each stage of the buying cycle.
An efficient way to do this is by building a content library, as shown below, that matches offers to each stage of the cycle and with each title or functional area involved in the decision process.
With the aid of consistent promotion, you can use the library to deliver information and events that inspire confidence in the value of your solution and will grease the way to that all-important proposal stage.
I recommend scheduling a series of email communications to respondents based on their title and buying-cycle position, each communication promoting the next further-along-in-the-cycle offer or event.
If you're consistent, and you always keep your offers relevant to respondents' issues and role in the purchasing process, you'll get it done.
Is it taking too long and costing too much to get your campaigns out the door?
You know you're in trouble when both the VP of Sales and the VP of Marketing are hovering over your desk, demanding to know when your next lead-generation campaign is going to make it out the door. Creaky implementation can cost your company millions in lost revenue and reduced sales-force productivity. More to the point, it can also cost you your job!
So you'll be glad to know that there are two steps you can take immediately to improve matters.
- Step One: Prepare a comprehensive strategic planning document—a playbook that lays out the financial parameters for your campaign. It should include things like cost-per-lead, response rate, conversion rate, and cost-per-sale. And it should delineate your targeting, offer, messaging, and testing strategies. By thinking all this out—and writing it down—you not only save time giving direction to your creative resources but also avoid the needless changes and false starts that cost your company so much time and money. What's more, you can organize and utilize your resources more efficiently, because now everybody has a comprehensive playbook to follow.
- Step Two: Realize that your lead-generation campaigns are never going to hang in the Louvre. DaVinci you ain't. And neither is your agency. As direct marketers, we must deliver our messages clearly, quickly, and cost-effectively. Nothing must be allowed to interfere with that. Which means no over-designing, no over-engineering, and no over-investing. Sure, it's fun to play, fun to do wild, crazy, colorful, brand-integrated stuff. But that stuff requires more time to execute and more money to produce. If your message is not as clear as it can possibly be and if it costs you too much to deliver, then you are not going to hit your financial targets.
Text-based emails, white letter packages, and double postcards are cost-effective formats that demand inclusion in your repertoire of solutions. So sublimate your ego and use them. Then use them again. That's right, reusing proven concepts, offers, and package formats is the shortest route between you and success.
Why risk your position when you can leverage learning and knowledge from prior winning campaigns? Do not be afraid to borrow ideas in a smart and ethical way. Look at Who's Mailing What for samples of competitive packages being used successfully. Study what is working and then reverse-engineer your strategies and solutions based on what you observe from these competitive successes.
A final word
As I said at the start that time is not on the side of the direct marketer. But if you've developed a new—or renewed—appreciation of the importance of implementing fundamentals to solve problems and create success, then the time you've spent reading this article was time well spent. Good luck!
