In today’s marketplace, nearly everyone is looking to get more for less! In direct mail marketing, it’s no different. Many businesses need to reduce their costs, while increasing their response rate (ROI). Manipulating your database is key to pulling off this double play! Here are 5 ways you can achieve this for your business:
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Segment your database – Doing this will allow you to identify specific demographics for different groups within your mail list. Once you’ve applied segmentation and split out into groups – you can create different messages (images, variable text) that is specific to each group.
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Develop Models to help conduct segementation – Developing models on your data can be a very informative exercise, but it should be done in a statistically tedious way, where you learn from the data and leave your what you “think you know” out of it. Let the data tell you what‚Äôs going on. Start with descriptive statistics to verify the data you‚Äôve collected is clean and error-free, then move on to the model specification process, and finally segmentation. If this sounds a bit much, don‚Äôt hesitate to reach out to us as we do this stuff all the time.
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Collect and store Data on your prospects and customers РTracking is essential to a successful marketing campaign. You want to track as much data as possible on prospects and customers. That means not only do you want to know locations, acquisition sources, ages, and demographics, but you also want to be able to track e-mail open rates (for digital campaigns), response rates, website visit rates, etc. For a digital campaign, you’ll be able to track this all through specialized links, but for direct mail marketing campaigns its a bit more difficult. Its definitely worth the effort though to create unique customer codes and links to gather as much information as possible thru your direct mail efforts.
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Create multiple ways that customers and prospects can respond – There are many ways you can do this, and remember you don’t need to (or even want to) use all of them for just one piece. Spread the wealth! From uitilizing QR codes, to Purl’s (personalized URL’s) or even specific landing pages custom created on your website — there are many ways to engage your audience and let them interact with your business.
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Get familiar with your own customer database – Many businesses don’t put in the time to get to know who their own customers are. What we mean is, profile your customers. In a good way! Find out what common demographics they share. Not only will this allow you to craft specific, customized marketing pieces to them – but it will also allow you to do your prospect marketing in a more intelligent fashion. Just imaging being able to create clones of your best, most ideal customers. That is exactly what you can do when profiling your customer database!