Variable Data
Monday, October 13, 2008
Direct Mail- PURLs of Wisdom
Variable Data
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Moving on with Direct Mail
- Test the call-to-action- Every piece needs to relay a message or offer to the client that gives them a reason to react. With offset printing I can usually get three jumbo postcards up on a sheet... this means I can test three messages.
- Test target markets- I like to get my list and break it down into persona's. For businesses it might be verticals such as insurance or banking, where for consumer marketing it might be moms or teens.
- Test the geo-market- I also like to break my list down into geographic boundaries. For example I might test city versus rural.
By breaking my direct mail projects down in this facet, I can create a matrix to test each campaign and create some sort of coding to measure return. Obviously the return mechanism would be different for each client, but some low-tech solutions include placing a code on the direct mail piece and have the operator ask for the code or bring the piece in for redemption. Some of the high tech mechanisms in the past have included landing pages or RCF (Remote Call Forwarding) lines to track the return. Once the returns are counted and placed in the spreadsheet, you would get something that looks like the chart below. Well, shucks, it looks like Offer 3 was the big dog and it seemed to work the best with Target Market 3. And it worked even better in Geo Target 2. So, what did I learn here? Hopefully I received a good return overall, but more importantly, what can I do next time? In this case I'd know where to put my dollars for my next direct mail campaign.
All of this is fine and dandy and has helped us develop some pretty darn good campaigns over the years. But now there's something even cooler out there. Tomorrow I'll give a little shot out to purl's and variable data printing... where the "fit hits the shan."
You can Click Here to see a few direct mail samples to help you out.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Let Your Fingers Do the Walking
As I'm documenting the social networking relationships and processes, I thought I would share a few more traditional items over the course of the week. We are in the midst of a beta test to answer the more recent age old question, "Yellow Pages or Online?” Of course the quick answer to that is "it depends,” but we took it a step further with an existing client.
Yellow Pages have long since been the immeasurable marketing vehicle that would appear more like a crutch than an asset to most location-driven companies. In a 2004 blog post , Seth Godin referred to the Yellow Pages as the “Internet of its day.” Sure, the Yellow Pages got companies’ names out (and still do), but with advances in technology, business owners will opt for the medium with measurable results nine times out of 10. If most firms either doubled their Yellow Page spend or cut it in half, would they be able to tell me the difference? The typical answer is “no.”
Thus begins our little story. One of our clients has multiple locations and had a pretty big chunk of past marketing budget going toward Yellow Pages. When times were tough, they went from full pages to bold listings. This move had no rhyme or reason; it was based on somewhat of a gut feeling, with cost cuts leading the way. We wanted to bring some accountability into decisions like these by testing return. In order to do this, we set up five control locations in different regions of the US. With each location we ran a different size Yellow Page ad (to test placement size return) and IYP (or Internet Yellow Pages- to test online directory searches), as well as PPC (with Google Adwords- using our own system). For each of these tests we are running a RCF (Remote Call Forwarding) line to track calls coming from each vehicle. Once the results are in we can determine what works better and where, leaving room for regional differences. The next step will be taking the process nationwide. The test began in October and we should be getting the results later in November... stay tuned!
Saturday, October 4, 2008
The Road to Documentation
Btw, here's an incredible link from Peter Kim that describes what 134 brands are doing in social media Click Here.