List Building For Profit

December 6, 2012 by Tim · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Direct Marketing Lists

Profile your ideal customer

What segment or niche would respond to your offer? A great way to start is by analyzing your current customer base by who recently purchased an item, do they shop frequently what is the dollar volume. New customers will likely be similar to the people who currently do business with you.

Identify your best customers first…..by recent purchase, dollar amount, frequencey
customer databases or invoices, delivery information. These tell you who your customers are, what they buy, how often they shop, and how much they spend. Look for the
people who bought from you most recently, most often, and who spent the most money.

Understand your model customer the 80/20 Rule
Approximately 80% of your sales comes from the 20% percent of your database. Find them and ay attention to characteristics such as age, gender, income, and where they
live.

Understanding Marketing Lists

One easy way to do this is to through Eye/Comm’s data analysis tools. Utilizing survey research to identify consumers’ values, attitudes, and product preferences.

Testing these segments to find the most profitable list

Testing and segmenting the unique characteristics of your best and most profitable customers.

Open new channels to reach your customers and prospects using the methods they prefer. If they respond better to email use email if they answer their phone and delete you emails than use the phone.

Boost response through more specific, personalized offers (as opposed to generic, one-size-fits-all promotions).
Build loyalty programs that increase lifetime value.

Find more model customers

After segmenting your customers by demographic or standard industrial information, so you can tailor your message to match their needs and interests, and increase the chances that they’ll act on your offer.

Identify and target new prospects most like your best customers and drop the deadbeats.

Boost your direct response rate.

Increase your market penetration.

Dramatically improve your advertising ROI.
Track and analyze
Direct mail advertising is awesome because it provides measurable results. By testing and tracking you can determine the most effective lists, offers and creative.

Big Obama Campaign Victory Attributed To List Testing

November 23, 2012 by Tim · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Direct Marketing Strategy

These are some quotes from today’s Wall Street Journal and many professional Direct Marketing journals attribute much of Obama’s Campaign victory to extensive testing of campaign letters and the understanding of deep database analytics.

Demographic Segmenting

Who got which email depended on direct marketing data base marketing techniques about each fundraising prospect and how different people react to different messages. In this year’s election, it looks as if the Obama team’s use of such data was one of its biggest edges over the Romney effort.

Extensive Testing is the Secret

“Campaign manager Jim Messina pledged to “measure every single thing in this campaign” and built an analytics department five times the size of the 2008 effort. A Time magazine reporter got access to the data scientists in the campaign’s Chicago headquarters on the condition that the reporter would keep mum until after the election. “What they revealed as they pulled back the curtain,” Time recently reported, “was a massive data effort that helped Obama raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media.”

Obama Campaign Strategy

Big Name Geeks to Analyze The Data

“The campaign’s “chief scientist,” Rayid Ghani, had been at Accenture, where he co-wrote an academic paper describing work helping companies that “analyze large amounts of transactional data but are unable to systematically ‘understand’ their products.” For example, Mr. Ghani helped grocers figure out why people bought orange juice by reducing the product to attributes that could be analyzed by algorithms—”Brand: Tropicana, Pulp: low, Fortified with: Vitamin-D, Size: 1 liter, Bottle type: plastic.”

The Obama campaign focused on data showing the “persuadability” of voters. Multivariate tests identified issues and positions that could move undecided voters, ProPublica said: “The persuasion scores allowed the campaign to focus its outreach efforts—and their volunteer calls—on voters who might actually change their minds as the result. It also guided them in what policy messages individual voters should hear.”

Big data give incumbents a big advantage, Romney never knew what hit him!

“Which seems to have surprised the Romney team. The Obama campaign has used cookies to track its supporters online since the 2008 election. It spent the past 18 months creating a new, unified database, factoring in some 80 pieces of information about each person, from age, race and sex to voting history. (The campaign denied reports that it tracked visits to pornography sites in its outreach algorithms.) The Romney campaign says it tried to match the Obama campaign’s collection and analysis of data but had to start from scratch and had just seven months after the primaries.”

Why did the Republicans allow Obama to best them twice at the exact same game. Direct marketing analytics wins again!

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Mobile Marketing The New Frontier

October 9, 2012 by Tim · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Buy Mailing Lists

Smartphone and tablet use are on the rise and growing very rapidly and request for SMS lists and opt-in cell phone lists is also rising.

Mobile is proving to be the best way to reach customers and get them to take action. Plus, since most consumers are using smartphone and tablets, they’re able to gain more information while on the go, allowing them to make smarter purchasing decisions.

If your business has still not implemented a mobile advertising campaign, maybe the following statistics will help change your mind. These facts we’re recently published by Target Marketing online.

1. More than half of a person’s mobile phone usage is spent on apps.

2. Adults spend more time accessing media through a mobile device than they do with magazines and newspapers combined.

3. The average response time to an email is 90 minutes. The average response time to a text message is 90 seconds.

4. 61% of people said that if they tried to access a website on their mobile device but couldn’t because the site isn’t optimized for mobile, they would visit the website of a competitor.

5. 1 out of every 8 smartphone users will search for better pricing on a product or service while at the store.

6. 1 out of every 6 smartphone users will scan a barcode to learn more information.

7. In 2011, the use of QR codes increased by 300%.

8. 61% of smartphone users use their smartphone to make local searches.

9. By 2015, more people will access the Internet through a smartphone or tablet than a PC.

10. In 2011, the use of mobile devices to read emails increased by 34% while the use of desktop PCs to read emails went down by 11%.

11. 13.4% of a person’s smartphone usage is spent reading or sending text messages.

12. In 2012, there was a 55% increase in smartphone subscriptions.

13. 79% of people use their phone to make or influence a purchasing decision.

14. The mobile ad market is expected to grow to $22 billion by 2016.

15. In 2011, 17.7 billion apps were downloaded. By 2015, that number should grow to 108 billion.

16. In 2011, 33% of people accessed Facebook through a mobile device.

17. In 2011, 7.8 trillion text messages were sent.

18. Mobile coupons are 10x more likely to be used than traditional paper coupons.

19. 91% of smartphone owners have their phone within 3 feet at all times.

20. People who access Facebook with their mobile device use the social network on a more regular basis.

21. The average person will wait 26 hours before reporting a lost wallet. The average person will wait 68 minutes before reporting a lost phone.

22. 62% of smartphone owners will use a search engine at least once every day.

23. 61% of smartphone users will only look at the first page of a search engine results page.

24. 59% of consumers have been influenced by a mobile advertisement.

25. In the past 3 years, more than 300,000 apps have been developed.

Direct Mail Tracking

September 19, 2012 by Tim · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Direct Marketing Strategy

There is a great free e-book entitled “Pitney Bowes Small Business Survey” compares the different marketing strategies run by small businesses.

In this free e-book is a shocking truth about direct mail is that 80 percent of the participants do not track down the results produced by their direct mail campaigns. Any direct mail marketer can tell

There is still a sizable number of businesses that primarily employ direct mail for marketing purposes (22 percent), a segment that values customer response as a metric to determine the success of their direct mail campaign.

The biggest advantage to using direct mail is how simple it is to measure the results and testing lists, creative, envelopes and premiums and this is only the start of the analysis. This study indicates only a few measure or test the usefulness of direct mail.

How to Measure Direct Mail

The number of respondents to your call to action featured on your direct mail campaign is what matters. This can be measured by foot traffic of customers that enter your store, or responses to a mailing for a paid subscription.

Below are the kinds of mearurement tools for your direct mail campaign:

If you have an e-commerce website you can mail direct mail lists that leads them to a page on your site using s short URL. Coupons can be used for holding s sale, print out brochures or postcards to be sent through the mail each piece can be tracked by a unique code. Toll free numbers on.

How do define success and how to measure it Revenue, Income or ROI

Revenue – Sum of the total earnings of your campaign
Income – Difference of revenue and cost of goods or profits after expenses
Rate of Investment (ROI) – Difference of gains and cost of goods divided by the gain.

The higher the better!

Email Prospecting With Social Media

September 13, 2012 by Tim · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Email Lists

The biggest benefit of direct response advertising is the ability to laser target your message to your acquired list or active customer database.

Blasting a one size fits all to your current customer database or to a randomly selected list, or to a targeted list based on demographics alone, could lead to a high opt out-rate, eliminating future communications with important consumers. This could also get you banned from your email service provider, if you don’t properly use the opt-out feature in acquired email lists.

Social media is greatly overlooked by email marketers and can be found within social media sites like Twitter and even blogs.

Most social media marketing efforts focus on image advertising since many many people on the social networks are turned off by traditional advertising methods.

My favorite social media marketing blonde

The social media platforms claim their influence rankings or number of friends may provide lift. A key to the social networks like Facebook is the complexities of identifying true influencers is difficult to identify and measure.

A strategy that leverages social media channels, is to go with the flow of traditional advertising where brands already have robust platforms, experience and measurement tools.

The reason for the platforms are established where consumers are already comfortable being marketed to, Think of social media is a magnet that brings you to your customers and prospects, allowing you to offer timely and relevant offers based on life stage events, hobbies and interests that consumers openly share.

You can blend traditional data elements to qualify the signals acquired from social media to ensure you are messaging to people who fit your best target audience profile. Facebook offers great demographic targeting by gender, age, political beliefs and interests.

Social Login Buttons: Making the link between social and offline consumer data is key to harnessing the vast amount of unstructured data in the world of social media. There are endless approaches to making this link, but the easiest way to start is by enabling consumers to make the link themselves between their email, name and address with a social ID like a Twitter handle. You can leverage the social media platform’s API and build your own buttons, or leverage a product like JanRain’s turnkey offering.

Four Questions To Qualify Your Prospect

August 9, 2012 by Tim · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Direct Marketing Leads

To make sure that you’re speaking with the real prospect that is actually ready to buy and not a tire kicker or someone that is just gathering information to purchase the same service/product from your competition you need to ask four questions.

Does the prospect have a burning need now or just a mild want?

Unless the customer sees you as a solution to their problem, it is unlikely that you will sell something and to set an appointment without finding a current need can be a big waste of time and gas.

Is this a fast tract situation or not?

Find out ahead of time if prospect will need this soon or at a later time. If he doesn’t need it until the end of the year than he doesn’t qualify as a hot prospect and will need to be qualified again at a later date. Maybe there just gathering information and they have no intention of ever buying anything.

What is the status of their current vendor relationship?

Maybe the customer is just getting bids to keep the current vendor from over charging them and want to make sure their getting the best price possible.

Do You Have A Compelling Message?

Have you offered a solution customized to their specific needs? A one size fits well no longer will cut it with customers in this hyper competitive marketplace. You must make yourself unique and set your self apart from the competition. When you customize services that only fits the needs of your customer you force them to only come to your for a solution rather than trying to get a better price from your competitors.

Planning for Marketing ROI

August 1, 2012 by Tim · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Direct Marketing Strategy

The best marketing programs should have measurement strategies planned in advance. So as part of planning any program, you need to answer these questions:

1.What will you measure?
2. When will you measure?
3. How will you measure?

You need to take steps to make your marketing programs measurable. This often includes doing the cumbersome tasks of setting up test and control groups or varying your spending levels across markets to measure relative impact.

Without variance in your marketing, unless you have a large bud get and a technical staff for SAS programming you may not be able to use modeling to tease apart the incremental impact of your marketing programs and improve your marketing precision and mix.

Data Collection

A key part of planning for measurement is simply tracking the appropriate attributes for all your marketing programs (and their variants). This may include target audience, message, channel, offer, investment level, and any other relevant attributes.

Project Management Meeting

Even if you don’t use the data right away, it will become invaluable down the road when you attempt any of the more sophisticated approaches towards measuring program effectiveness. These attributes can be stored in anything from your marketing automation system to a simple spreadsheet hosted on a share drive – what matters the most is that you start to build the history as early as possible.

You’ll deliver the best ROI and get the best benefits when you move past backward-looking measurement to forwardlooking
decisions.

This is the difference between marketing measurement and marketing management.
It is the difference between data, intelligence, and knowledge.

An integral part of your planning process is identifying up-front what decisions you need to make to drive company profits, and then building your measurements to capture information that facilitates these decisions.

This means you must measure things not just because they are measurable – but because they will guide you towards the decisions you need to make to improve company profitability.

Isn’t it time to swap your over-the-shoulder stance, which prevents you from moving forward efficiently, for strategic, objective.

Each measurement should seek to focus your understanding of how to make the program better and align it with your
company’s strategic objectives.

The reason is even if you don’t meet all of your program goals, you can still figure out why and how to improve the program.

This is almost always better than launching a new program you don’t yet know anything about.

Author Bio: Tim Little – Direct Marketing My marketing process allows me to identify business problems, formulate marketing plans, initiate change, and implement effective solutions that deliver profit and returns on investments, efficiencies, and cost reductions systems.

I analyze competition to find their weaknesses and optimize my strengths. My experience includes finding leads, testing landing pages with Google AdWords, WordPress Web development and offline with list procurement, database marketing and direct mail expertise.

Prospecting: Ways to Find the Real Decision Maker

July 19, 2012 by Tim · Leave a Comment
Filed under: B2B List

Finding the decision maker can be the most important step in closing the sale and the first step is to define the decision makers title.

In a larger company this could be a senior vice president, vice president or director. If you are calling small companies the person you want
to reach is often the owner.

This strategy also works when purchasing lists, once you have identified the appropriate this is a “no brainer” or titles:

1. Check the prospect company’s web site. This is the easiest way to find your prospect’s name. On the Internet, many companies today list executive and/or senior management by name on their web sites.

2. Ask the receptionist or the person picking up the toll free line. Dial the main number and ask the front line person who answers for the name of the person who has the appropriate title. Be prepared to throw out Keep suggesting titles until one sounds familiar to that receptionist.

3. Call the Chief Executive Officer. The theory: Executive assistants know everything. Call the CEO’s office and say, “I’m wondering if you can help me.” The executive assistant will more than likely point you in the right direction.

4. You can type a sequence of numbers until you find reach a human being. When you do, say “I’m wondering if you can help me?” Ask, “Do you have a company directory? I’m looking for Dr. Smith” When asked, most people are happy to help.

5. Ask a salesperson. Sale people are at least friendly and willing to help Call the sales department and speak with a salesperson. Say, “I’m wondering if you can help me.” Salespeople will understand and if they can they will help you. Tell the salesperson exactly who you are trying to reach.

6. Ask Customer Service for help. It’s what they do. Call and say, “I’m wondering if you can help me.” If the Customer Service representative does
not know the correct name, ask, “Do you have a directory handy?Author Bio: Tim Little – Direct Marketing My marketing process allows me to identify business problems, formulate marketing plans, initiate change, and implement effective solutions that deliver profit and returns on investments, eff

Find The Decision Maker

Is Facebook A Waste Of Time?

July 4, 2012 by Tim · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Direct Marketing Leads

Is advertising on Facebook a lot of hype and are you wasting your time and money?

Many direct marketers are asking this question. Over the last month came the bad news over disappointing Facebook IPO following the announcement that GM was pulling its Facebook advertising because of its ineffectiveness.

This is the new backlash against social media marketing.

This maybe the new era in social media marketing where email marketing is becoming more popular and social media marketing maybe on it’s way out.

Investing in social media marketing maybe a trend that is on it’s way out at least for a while until you can measure an return on investment, like you can with any other advertising channel.

The current situation with Facebook and advertising maybe a passing trend and many new advertisers may prove that you can indeed make a profit by getting your prospects to hit the like button.

Facebook advertising

Up until a few months ago social marketing was the trendy advertising channel that many direct marketers we’re using. The changing technology is effecting direct marketers since the poor economy is making it more difficult to squeeze profits and response rates from the overwhelmed Business to Business prospects.

List Marketing

June 19, 2012 by Tim · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Marketing Lists

The first step in selecting the perfect lists, you need to know who you’re mailing to. They’re your target audience, and they’re the customer segments that you think your product or service.

The real key to unlocking the potential of list marketing is to define your target audience with as many attributes as you can. This ensures that your marketing offers only go to those people who are most likely to buy your product.

The most common mistake that most list marketers make is sending offers to a poorly defined target audience. Once you’ve used a combination of these parameters to define your audience, it’s time to take that information to a list owner, list manager, or list broker. Read more

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List Building For Profit

Profile your ideal customer

Understanding Marketing Lists

Testing and segmenting the unique characteristics of your best and most profitable customers.

Find more model customers

More Articles for List Building For Profit

Big Obama Campaign Victory Attributed To List Testing

Demographic Segmenting

Extensive Testing is the Secret

Obama Campaign Strategy

Big Name Geeks to Analyze The Data

Mobile Marketing The New Frontier

More Articles on Mobile Marketing The New Frontier

Direct Mail Tracking

How to Measure Direct Mail

How do define success and how to measure it Revenue, Income or ROI

More Articles on Direct Mail Tracking

Email Prospecting With Social Media

My favorite social media marketing blonde

More Articles on Email Prospecting with Social Media

Four Questions To Qualify Your Prospect

Do You Have A Compelling Message?

More Articles on Questions To Qualify Your Prospect

Planning for Marketing ROI

Data Collection

A key part of planning for measurement is simply tracking the appropriate attributes for all your marketing programs (and their variants). This may include target audience, message, channel, offer, investment level, and any other relevant attributes.

More Articles About Planning for Marketing ROI

Prospecting: Ways to Find the Real Decision Maker

Find The Decision Maker

More Articles on Finding the Real Decision Maker

Is Facebook A Waste Of Time?

Facebook advertising

More Articles on Facebook Advertsing

List Marketing

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