Direct Response Marketing

Before ACT!, a division of a Canadian printing company experienced a typical response rate of 5% or less in their direct mail campaigns (data from Direct Marketing Association or DMA). After fully integrating ACT! CRM (customer relationship management) software into their business, their direct mailing campaign response rate rose, not only by 10, 20 or 50%, but to a whopping 74%! Not only did this increased response do well for the bottom line, but it also garnered a DMA 2006 International ECHO Award for the company. This just goes to show the power of being able to create a targeted campaign with specific products for specific customers. ACT! software made it possible for this company division to re-organize their customer care focus in a more detailed manner.

According to a VP, it was not possible for them to generate targeted lists in so very short a time and with very high levels of precision. With the addition of ACT! CRM to their system, they were able to do all of it in one single day.

Prior to installing ACT! CRM in their system, the company suffered through inconsistency and lead tracking methods. In addition, customer information files had no hub or centralized location. They agonized over the amount of time wasted searching for files from different departments. The entry of ACT! provided a solution for all of these problems by standardizing marketing and sales methods and providing a central database where all files are stored and organized. Today, their concerned employees have access to the central database to use for quick referencing customer information sheets. The need to run around from one department to another has been eliminated. This gave the company the benefits of efficiency and increased productivity.

The level of success that ACT! gave them has prompted other divisions of their company to look into acquiring the same CRM technology currently in use by this one single division. ACT! software provided a solution that gave them the necessary push to move ahead of other divisions in terms of sales performance.

To fully utilize the benefits that they received from ACT!, additional ACT! add-on software was installed to provide them with automated email marketing and response tracking capabilities. They got all of these benefits by integrating Swiftpage with their current ACT! CRM system.

The beauty of ACT! software lies in it’s compatibility with Outlook, Palm OS and other handheld devices. This compatibility eventually evolved into remote interconnectivity where field personnel with the right equipment are able to access the central ACT! database. This assistance that this system provides sales personnel on call is priceless. Just before knocking on the client’s door, a sales person may extract the client’s information from the database in order to come up with a definitive strategy that will entice the client to buy.

There is a lot more to ACT! than what is written here. Of all that is written though, one thing cannot be denied. Utilizing ACT! software helped a company rise from the doldrums, all the way to the pinnacle, in just a few short days.

Direct response marketing solicits a direct response from your customers, according to Austin marketing consultants.

Instead of putting your product out on the web, on store shelves, or in a regular advertisement, you introduce your product to them through TV, radio, or print mediums and give them a way to respond and buy right that moment.

For Texas marketing agencies and businesses, direct response marketing provides a way to generate interest and demand for your product or service as well as rake in profits from sales.

Austin marketing consultants implement direct response in businesses every day. Consulting with a Texas marketing agency can teach you how to implement it in yours.

But the question most people have about direct response marketing and what keeps them away from Austin marketing consultants and marketing agencies relates to how direct response marketing works and why it is a better form of marketing than retail shelves, the Internet, or regular advertising.

Well, let’s think about it. Think about commercials that you watch on TV which sell kitchen appliances and the like. Only think about the commercials that direct you to a website or give you a number to call because those are direct response commercials.

Correct me if I and all Texas marketing agencies are wrong. You view those commercials so often, you hear about those products so many times, that they become branded in your mind.

Direct response marketing gives businesses like yours a way to brand your product. Branding is product recognition. Product recognition generates trust which generates sales.

Austin marketing consultants know, and so should you, that once you brand your product, increased sales become imminent because trust and confidence in that product grow.

But why should your business use direct response marketing or bother with an Austin marketing consultant or marketing agency to even consider it?

Let’s put it this way. If you ever want to take your business to retail, direct response marketing gives your product a track record to bring to wholesalers and retailers.

Any retail store will want to know that your product will sell. Show them that through actual sales figures and advertising dollars invested for your product.

Austin marketing consultants use direct response for more than sales. A sale might be the end purpose, but your direct response campaign might not lead to the sale. Instead, it can generate a lead.

You can also use direct response marketing in your Texas business to generate more traffic to a website and lure them to your business by giving free information or offers.

A Texas marketing agency will go over all your options for direct response marketing campaigns, and also explain the benefits you will see by beginning one.

An Austin marketing consultant will also cover the many ways you can take advantage of direct response marketing. Direct mailings, television, and radio encompass just a few of the ways you can make direct response marketing work for your business.

Other types of direct response marketing include:

PPC campaigns on the Internet
Newspaper inserts
Door hangings
Postcards
Catalogs

Think about all the times you’ve bought something from a direct response ad, commercial, or mailer. Then think about what that same marketing will do for your product.

In today’s day in age, businesses face tough competition to sell their products. The age of the Internet increases that competition.

However, when you use direct response marketing to promote your product and business in Texas, you take a step up from the competition.

When you seek the help of an Austin marketing consultant or Texas marketing agency to take your product and sales where you want them to go, you invest in a road map that will ultimately lead you to success.

Direct response marketing techniques should be used according to your budget. Some techniques are simple, while others require a larger investment.

Sometimes is seems that direct response marketing techniques should be anything but direct. Direct response marketing specialists are very fast to prove that there is one envelope color that always works better than another. Sans serif font type pulls 22% more than serif. Multi step marketing of the three steps provide more back end potential than other processes involving four or more steps. Typically these direct response marketing pros have all the documentation to prove that their methods work better than the next…

However, sometimes to take advantage of direct response marketing techniques, they should be used in ways that are indirect. Rules can be broken if the situation and campaign calls for it, and new rules need to be established.

I was hired by another company to manage the marketing for a very nice hotel in California. The job was an easy one. It was to announce the opening of a gorgeous new, upscale, very expensive hotel. Easy, right?

Keep in mind that I was just brought on for this job, so I did not have much experience if any with the company that I was dealing with. So I was ready to conform to their rules and see how I can fit it. What was I going to bring to the table? I was going to apply my basic knowledge of direct response marketing techniques by the book.

So I started out using a standard letter in a standard windowed envelope, and I was ready to get it out. I was also hoping and ready to do a lot more because the hotel deserved a better launch, or at least that’s how I personally felt. A hotel as nice as this needed to be introduced to the new people who would stay inside it’s beautiful luxurious walls. And sleep on its amazing beds looking out over the Pacific Ocean.

I was hoping for people to experience the “experience” of this hotel through my sales offer, and I was not too convinced that a standard letter in a windowed envelope would convey that message I was hoping.

So what did I do? I did what I always tell others to do, I took care of the project as they wanted me to, then I did what I felt would be best. I showed them the ideas that I had with the envelope and the standard letter, the serif type, but then I took it a step further.

I showed them something that I thought was worthy of that amazing hotel. It was a multifold, full color, bleed brochure that looked amazing, because it was exactly what the hotel felt like, inside and out. Rather than try and sell this hotel in words, I did so in pictures, capturing the grandeur of the hotel. Now, I’m not saying I’m a genius, but this direct response marketing technique really worked!

So what was the result of going against the grain so to speak? It was a staggering success. So looking back, yes, your direct response marketing techniques should be anything but direct!

So what did I learn out of all this? I learned that it’s best to follow directions, then take it one step further and follow your intuition.

I produce Pay Per Click how-to training sessions geared to help online marketers increase their search marketing ROI. As Chairman for PPC Summits, I meet online marketers from around the world, and there is one common theme that seems to reoccur frequently: the myth that SEM is some kind of rocket science. What most marketers don’t understand is SEM falls under the category of Direct Response Marketing.

SEM is just another form of direct response marketing and many of the same principles apply. Successful marketing messaging resonates with the intended audience and the same controls apply to search marketing campaigns.

Here are some direct response marketing principles that should also apply to your SEM campaigns:
• It takes work. Successful marketers have to constantly test response rates: copy, keywords, placement, pricing, messages, landing pages…
• You have to test. In direct response marketing, testing rules is never-ending. Just like testing in direct mail, the cost of the campaign can be justified if the lift in the conversion rate is enough to offset the expense. If the lift in conversion offsets the cost of optimizing the pages, keep testing and roll out new ones.
• You have to track results. Just as savvy offline marketers can tell which piece of mail and from which specific message a customer converted, you have to be able to tell which keyword, message and referrer drove your sale. Tracking is easy to do on PPC, harder on search engine optimization, but critical on both.
• Creative is key. Google rewards those with high click-through rates on PPC by better placement, and the way to get high CTRs is to write great copy that resonates with your audience. Similar to an offline campaign, online creative (i.e., your search listings) should be tested frequently.
• It's all about the benefit. Successful marketers sell on benefits, not features, and look for the messages that play on their customers' emotional responses to their product or service. Over time, you will discover offers that work only online, but like offline marketing, it comes through the same test-and-learn discipline.
• The "Lead to Sale" conversion rate is important. Just as in the offline world the key to conversions from search is providing the right hook in your listing at the right phase of the buying cycle, and then converting that lead into a paying customer with the right offer on your landing page.
• Analysis is your friend. Like any good offline campaign, you learn a great deal from analyzing your testing and conversions. One set of keywords can perform significantly better than the rest; but because even changing a keyword from singular to plural can have dramatically different results, you have to test and analyze each variable separately.
• It's all about CPA or CPL. All search engine marketing campaigns need to be analyzed by cost per acquisition (CPA) or cost per lead (CPL).
• Create customer loyalty. Search engines are looking more and more at how many websites link to yours.. You need customer evangelists driving more sales, and links can provide that.

Direct response marketing skills and experience are some of the key drivers in SEM campaigns. There are some nuances of SEM that you can only learn by experience, but if you go into it with the mindset that these rules apply you will demystify the whole experience.

PPC Summit Boston March 3-4, Vancouver March 31-April1, London April 14-15, San Francisco May 19-20, and Los Angeles Sept. 2008.

Before the dawn of Internet marketing, there was direct response marketing. It involved sending long sales letters by postal mail to customers about a certain product; the direct response marketer wanted the customer to fill out the order form and mail it back to the address posted with his/her order information included.

This was (and still is) a very effective form of marketing, but was (and still is) quite expensive - sending out just 1,000 letters can cost you at least $2,000. It also takes good to great sales copy in order to convert those prospects into customers; if your sales copy falters, your financial loss will be that much larger, as you won't recover much of the cost from sending out those letters.

With the advent of the Internet, a new direct response marketing was born. Using the Internet, marketers could now quickly and inexpensively send thousands of emails at the click of a button to potential customers, instead of relying on slower and more expensive snail mail.

Prospects can open the email, read the sales letter of the website you are promoting, and order the product using the "order button" on the website.

And while traditional products, like books and CDs, can still be sold over the Internet, a new type of product also emerged - digital products, including ebooks, MP3 files, and software programs. These digital products can be sent to the customers immediately after payment, just by redirecting them to the download area where they can download those products.

Due to the emergence of digital products, people's appetite for instant information continues to increase. The power of the Internet allows information marketers to be able to fill that need instantaneously.

Information marketers who do business on the Internet (a.k.a. Internet marketing) have great advantages over those information marketers who only do business offline:

- You can set up an online sales page in just a few hours.

- You can deliver the product(s) to your customers instantly after they complete their transactions.

- You can create digital products at far less cost than traditional books and CDs.

- You get your payment before you send out your product(s).

- You can automate the online sales process, allowing it to work for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Orders can come in anytime, even while you are asleep or away from your computer.

Conversely, offline marketers have to

- spend more in order to create their books and CDs.

- have to have retail space to store their inventory.

- advertise in magazines, newspapers, and other print media.

- have someone working for them to make sales, whether it's themselves (costing them time) or someone else working for them (costing them money.)

Online marketing is also becoming a richer industry because more and more people are coming online each year to make their lives easier. Tens of billions of dollars are spent online each year. The amount spent will keep growing each year for the foreseeable future, as Internet marketing isn't likely to go away or be surpassed by anything anytime soon. This is evident by the growing number of emails we get in our inboxes on how to solve every problem we have, from Internet marketing to weight loss.

Thanks to Internet marketing's accessibility to every one with an Internet connection, lower costs of doing business, and quicker delivery of products, it has become the "direct response marketing" of the 21st century.

To really learn about direct marketing and how you can use it to better your business you should first understand what direct marketing is.

According to Wikipedia, direct marketing is defined as "a sub discipline of marketing focused to driving purchases that can be attributed to a specific call to action". This marketing discipline can include and medium that allows you to communicate directly with customers. Some examples of direct marketing include, direct mail, email, newspaper, radio, television, and of course the internet.

The main focus of any direct marketing strategy is to increase the number of customers that respond to your marketing campaign or "response rate" while also trying to decrease the cost of advertising. Increasing customer response to your advertising will accomplish two very important things. One, increase the number of sales leads generated by advertising, and two, further establish business name recognition.

The ability to properly communicate with your business's target audience is an extremely important factor in your overall business success. As you learn about direct marketing; keep in mind that persistence really does pay.

One of the most important aspects of designing a successful direct marketing campaign is in targeting your audience. Developing a marketing campaign that speaks directly to your potential customer's wants and needs will mean the difference between creating quality sales leads for your business and utter frustration at a lack of customer responsiveness.

Several important questions to answer when developing any direct marketing campaign are:

* Who..? Who are you targeting with your particular business message? Who are the people who would be most interested in hearing what you have to say?

* Why..? Do you just want people to review a few helpful products..or do you want them to retain your services?

* What...? What specific benefits are you offering through your message?

* When...? Are you looking for a more immediate response from your reader...or are you providing food for thought and building your relationship?

* Last but not least...How? How do you intend to present and distribute your message to your potential customers?

Your study of direct marketing will be an on going process. It's important to understand what works for you and your business, what doesn't, and why that is. The key to success will be in continuing to try different strategies and techniques in order to perfect a particular combination of things that work well for you.