Automatic Marketing

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erence the magazine in the first few lines of your letter to show you know
something about the person to whom you are writing. You ll need to get
the list owner s permission to do this.
5. Test various segments of a list.
Often I hear direct mailers say that a list they tested did not work. I then
find out that they only conducted one 5,000-name test of 0-to-18-month
buyers from the list. Maybe this select from this list doesn t work. But
narrowing your select to 0-to-6 month buyers might work just fine. Or
maybe the list owner will let you mail to multi-buyers only, which are at
least three times stronger than one-time buyers.
You should also conduct gender tests. Women and men respond dif-
ferently. Some products, even if they are not gender specific products (in-
surance, for example) might nevertheless appeal more to women or more
to men. A list that might not work well if you mail both to men and
women might work if you mail your appeal to just women or just men,
depending on the product.
Geography can also make a difference. If you are selling Bibles,
maybe your offer will work best in Bible Belt states. If you are selling
gun-related products, maybe you should stick to rural areas, where there
are a lot of hunters. Test to find out. You should also test by age and in-
come if possible. The point is to not assume a list is no good for you just
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because your test of one broad select failed. Be surgical in your testing.
Find out every select the list owner will let you test. Choose a series of
intelligent tests.
You ll likely have to pay more for detailed and narrow selects, but the
bigger return may well be worth the extra cost. And don t just accept
what s printed on the data card as the only selects available. Negotiate
the selects you want with the list owner. Be a strategist. Come at the
prospect list you re renting from many different angles.
6. Repackage successful appeals and re-mail them to
the same lists.
Successful packages can often be repackaged with different techniques,
carriers, formats, and graphics and re-mailed through prospect lists that
have worked well.
People remember how packages look, not so much the specific words
that are in a package. By putting otherwise identical packages in differ-
ent clothes such as different looking envelopes, different colors, differ-
ent paper stock, different graphic layout most of your readers will as-
sume it s a different letter.
As always, however, be sure to test your different looking packages.
A change in the way a package looks can dramatically affect returns, up
or down. For example, I was using a yellow post-it note very successfully
for a prospect appeal I had been mailing for months. I then tried using a
light blue post-it note instead, just to change the look and to see if color
was important. My returns dropped 25 percent. In this case, keeping the
post-it note yellow was important, I guess because it looked more like a
standard yellow post-it note people are used to seeing.
So make changes to the look and feel of your successful prospect
packages. Constantly experiment. And always test your changes.
7. If you re prospecting with a non-sweepstakes offer,
require the list owner to remove all sweeps-only
buyers.
Some marketers have built a large portion of their house list with sweep-
stakes offers. An offer that uses a sweepstakes contest to draw the reader
into the letter is a powerful marketing technique. But responders to
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sweepstakes offers tend to answer only offers built around a sweepstakes
contest and are weak prospects for conventional marketing packages. It s
fine if a buyer has answered both sweepstakes and conventional offers.
What you don t want are sweeps-only or unique-sweeps buyers if you re
mailing a conventional sales pitch. This little instruction can make an
enormous difference in the performance of your prospecting campaign.
Remember, smart direct mailers spend a lot of time weeding out peo-
ple who are least likely to respond. Sweeps-only buyers are not likely to
answer your conventional sales offer. Weed them out.
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Chapter Twenty-Eight
Summing up
The difference between true marketing (as I ve been describing to
you here) and Madison Avenue advertising is this:
Unlike all your letters, emails, and direct response ads, the 60-second
advertisements you see on TV promoting the major brands are not aimed
at generating immediate sales and inquiries. And they don t. There are
no results to measure for the Madison Avenue ad.
These ads are designed to create brand recognition and public aware-
ness. They are aimed at making the public familiar with the brand and
the name of the product.
There is no real way to precisely measure the effectiveness of these
Madison Avenue ads. The big corporations know they must advertise.
And they are just left hoping their ads are successful. But there s no real
benchmark for success, other than the decision-makers at the corporation
signing off on the big ad buy.
We certainly know these ads are successful for the ad agency, some of
which are racking up billions of dollars in billings. But we have no pre-
cise way of knowing if these ads are successful for the client . . . because
no orders or inquiries are arriving at the office in answer to these ads.
In this sense, the Madison Avenue ad agency s primary mission in life
is not to create ads that win customers, but to create ads that impress the
corporate client. If the ad happens to be good and brings customers in,
that s a bonus for the ad agency. But who will ever know if that s what s
happening?
The primary mission of the Madison Avenue ad agency is to sell the
client on the ad campaign, not to create ads that actually sell product.
Who really knows how all those Nike ads are doing?
The ads are attention-getting and interesting. They have certainly
done a great job of creating brand awareness and a hip image for the
company. I certainly enjoy the Nike ads. No doubt the ads are doing well
for Nike and are helping Nike build its image around the world. But
Nike has no way of knowing how each individual ad is doing. Nike has
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no idea how many sales each individual ad is generating. Nike really has
no way of knowing its return on investment for each ad launched.
The best Nike can do is guess. The best Nike can do is ASSUME its
ads are effective. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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