The best ROI in advertising
For some time now, direct mail has been considered a wallflower at the marketing
disco.
However as drycleaners learn the value of multi-media advertising, direct mail
is enjoying a full dance card. Because of its unique place in the marketing
mix, direct mail is once again leading the way.
 | ||
Direct mail brings several distinct qualities to the marketing mix. For one
thing, digital printing technologies enable a level of personalization, at a
reasonable cost, previously unavailable.
For another, direct mail is tactile — something that no other direct marketing method offers.
Finally, direct mail ties together a multi-media marketing campaign, pulling in
offline prospects, improving response rates and overall Return On Investment.
“Direct mail is becoming more and more relevant,” says Diane Quinlisk, senior manager of market development at Kodak Graphic
Communications in Rochester, NY.
“It used to be the stepchild of ad vehicles because it was sent en masse and wasn’t very sexy. Today, though, digital technologies allow for quality and color and
a variety of attention-getting images.
”
In addition to being highly targeted, direct mail’s three-dimensional qualities, and tangibility, make it possible to deliver
creative, unique marketing messages.
“People will get annoyed at incoming e-mail a lot more quickly than they will at
junk mail,
” says Peter Fader, Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of Business in
Philadelphia.
“ The process of going through mail – real versus virtual – is more enjoyable.”
Being tangible and three-dimensional also has the added benefit of staying
power.
It’s not just about the response but about how you’re branding your business. Direct mail has amazing staying power within the
home.
Finally, the ROI for direct mail is highly measurable. Drycleaners are
intelligent businesspeople. If something works they use it. That is why more
than 200 currently use Golomb Group programs.
Despite the higher costs per piece compared with some other forms of
advertising, such as e-mail, the significantly higher response rate (5.5
percent to 12 percent) makes direct mail the wisest choice for targeted
marketing.
The best results can be obtained by segmenting the target audience. It is easy
to forget that sales, profits and ROI are the result of customers, some of whom
buy once, some of whom buy often, other infrequently, some heavy users, others
light users, former customers and those aware of your services but have not yet
tried you.
Your customers should be segmented based on their purchase behavior — the financial value determined for the customers in each segment as well as the
total value of all the customers in each segment.
Once these customer segments and their contribution or potential contribution to
sales and profits are identified, programs targeted to changing the purchasing
behavior of the customer segments can be developed.
Too often marketing resources are allocated to programs that provide a
short-term boost to sales but at the expense of building a strong customer
base. For example, continual price promotions run the risk that consumers may
start to believe that the quality of work is being compromised, turning away
potential customers
— or, worse yet, only generating sales when incentives are high.
Direct mail also produces higher overall response rates than e-mail, newspapers
and magazines combined, and its response rates rank just below those of
catalogs, according to the U.S. Postal Service.
While telemarketing produces among the highest response rates, it is limited by
the national Do-Not-Call registry and a reputation as being intrusive.
Similarly, e-mail campaigns
— while highly trackable and famously affordable — are limited by spam and junk filters and are also viewed as intrusive.
Large corporations are shifting their marketing budgets from traditional
broadcast media to direct marketing as executives place their faith in the
proven ROI of direct mail.
Target marketers must ensure that their direct mail campaign is done correctly.
The only reason you want to go into the mail is that you want to have some call
to action, such as a coupon to bring to your nearest location.
To date, no other form of advertising works as well as a direct mailer with a
call to action sent to a targeted audience.
