How Would You Like a 20% Response Rate

On Your Advertising

Let’s face it. Most businesses don’t even know what a response rate is, let alone what theirs is. Most don’t actually expect a response rate. Most throw out their advertising, at great expense, and hope enough people show up over time to make them money. They have no control and they take no measurement.
Smart businesses don’t do that. Smart businesses make offers in their advertising and carefully track the responses they get, so they know what advertising is working for them and what advertising is a waste of money.
And smart advertisers who know their response rates would generally give their right arm for a 20% response rate.
But how do you get that kind of a rate, when traditional rates for direct mail, for example, are broadly reported to be one to two percent, and are headed down?
You use “integrated marketing,” that’s how.
Bill sent 500 direct mail solicitations to a select list of his best customers, inviting them to a 2-hour, private, pre-Valentine’s sale. He sent them out six days before the sale. But he wasn’t satisfied to just send the invitations by mail. Four days prior, he also sent about 250 of those same people an email invitation. (He’d have sent them all the email but he only has 250 of their email addresses – so far.) Still not satisfied, he made a telephone call to all 500, just to remind them, the day before the sale.
As a result, Bill had 100 people show up for his sale – a 20% response rate. His total investment in the marketing effort was about $900.00, which covered the costs of printing and mailing, emails and the recorded telemarketing calls.
During the 2-hour event, Bill sold $10,000.00 worth of merchandise. That’s about an 11 to 1 return on investment. But he wasn’t through yet. The next day he moved roughly $4,000.00 additional dollars from people who couldn’t make the private sale but came in afterward and bought something.
There are actually three keys to Bill’s success with this promotion…

1. Bill didn’t worry about marketing to the masses. He carefully selected his potential attendees from this list of his top customers. I’m talking about the people he already has a good relationship with. These were not folks that needed to be convinced he is a great guy to do business with. These folks already know and trust him.

There’s a big lesson in that for everybody. Cultivate your clients by taking good care of them, giving them an enjoyable buying experience and making them feel welcome and important to your company.
Once you have that kind of relationship, ethically exploit it. Ask these “super-customers” to come back and buy, over and over again.

2. Bill compressed the timing for the promotion. You can do this far more easily when you’re talking to your trusted clients, as opposed to goingto the public at large. The soonest anyone found out about Bill’s Private Sale was about 5 days in advance. They hardly had time to forget. By comparison, my client, Dennis mailed his Valentine’s day promotion three weeks early. His response, while still profitable, was more like the traditional 2% response. Bill recognized the nature of the public and the holiday to be procrastination oriented, so he used that to his advantage in his “blitz.”

3. Finally, Bill utilized the idea of “INTEGRATED MARKETING.” In other words, he didn’t leave it to one medium to reach his audience. He took advantage of three.

There is nothing new about the concept of integrated marketing. Radio has made a living preaching this sermon to advertisers for decades. “We don’t want all of your ad budget. We want to complement what you are doing in the newspapers. We find that when you add radio to your newspaper or direct mail efforts, your results will improve.”
Indeed this has been my experience. Radio will boost response to print advertising, particularly when your radio ads reference your print or direct mail ads.
Bill’s effort proves that you can combine less traditional media very effectively in the integrated mix. Direct mail remained his cornerstone effort, but augmentation with email, which was free in this case, and the pre-recorded telephone calls, which cost just pennies a call to execute, proved a very formidable combination indeed.
It’s important to note that there is a difference between multi-media marketing and an integrated marketing approach
In the multi-media model, you are recognizing that there is surprisingly little cross-over between individual media. The people who are watching TV aren’t necessarily reading the paper. The people reading the paper may not be paying much attention to their mail. The message may be fundamentally the same in each medium, but the messages are designed to stand alone. You’re not using one medium to drive response to another.
Integrated marketing acknowledges that people may not be naturally crossing over from one medium to another, but also asserts that the multiple media can be used to directly reinforce each other for a specific, direct response result. If your radio ads drive people to your newspaper ads, you’ll get higher readership and therefore a greater response to your newspaper ads.
For small business, direct mail is the best launching pad for an integrated approach. You not only know exactly how many people you are reaching, but you know exactly who they are. And that means your follow-up is easy. Email makes a lot of sense – and if you’re not collecting the email addresses of your clients yet, you need to begin yesterday. And the targeted telemarketing is another economical natural. You can do it with live people, but Bill’s pre-recorded, automated system approach featuring his own voice on the recording proved to be a very effective alternative.
One more nice thing. You can play small ball. You don’t have to do a promotion like Bill’s to thousands. He went to 500. Another client of mine went to just 75 clients with a letter and follow-up live phone call. The result was eight sales worth over $14,400.00 in revenue, on a $50.00 ad investment. Not bad.

NOTE: For an 8-page newsletter on INTEGRATED MARKETNG send an email request to mail@AscendMarketing.com.