Direct Marketing Campaign Planning – Handling Your Responses

The latest instalment of our series on planning a direct marketing campaign is dedicated to the subject of response handling, and how this vitally important aspect of the campaign should be planned in order to yield the most significant benefit. Planning how to handle the responses returned from your direct marketing can be split into 2 major areas; the first, your methods of collecting different responses and secondly how the responses (and subsequent data) should be managed.

Collecting Your Responses

Previously the importance of a multichannel approach has been presented, however it is important to understand how to collect the different responses returned from such an approach.

Telephone – If one of your channels utilises inbound phone calls to collect responses it is vital to create a team of customer service professionals to handle these calls, a team that understand the objectives of the campaign and has been effectively trained to handle responses.

Email – Setting up a dedicated email address is another form of collecting responses. This can be a single email address or multiple addresses in accordance with the direct marketing segments.

Website – Depending upon the marketing strategy, the creation of a campaign specific website can be a worthwhile course of action. This website or simply a landing page should contain the enquiry forms and may even operate an Iframe to harvest the responses.

Social Media – Increasingly social media is being used within direct marketing campaigns due to its growing popularity as a marketing medium. Once again, campaign specific pages can be set up to handle responses whilst connections made through social media can be an effective way to build customer profiles.

Managing Your Responses

Once you have decided which response channels to use as part of your campaign, to ensure they are managed effectively it is important to undertake the following.

• Firstly, you should make an assessment of your in-house capabilities, investigating your internal capacity to handle/manage responses.
• Secondly, if this assessment reveals that your internal capacity is insufficient, you may want to consider outsourcing response handling activities.
• Finally, whether the handling activities are being handled in-house or outsourced, it is vitally important to set out, precisely what defines an opportunity, as this will be used when determining the success of the project.

Response handling is a key component in any marketing campaign whilst understanding multiple response channels and whether an in-house or outsourced solution will be most effective are both important in the planning stage.

Direct Marketing Campaign Planning – Getting the Message Right

At the heart of every successful direct marketing campaign is the marketing message; a message that has been carefully constructed so that it will deliver the greatest returns on marketing expenditure. Essentially there are three main processes needed when considering the message these are:

Refinement

By now in the campaign the message has typically been developed although it is vital that it is refined if it is to be successful. Any message should first and foremost understand the challenges and problems facing the target audience and offer them a solution. Delivering this message should be from a strongly branded standpoint which aims to build trust with recipients from the outset. It is also worth considering using the segmented data, to refine messages for each segmented group so that the target audience receives the most relevant message to their needs. Finally, the message and physical content of the communication should ALWAYS include a call to action that will entice the recipient to respond.

Thinking, Feeling & Doing

Not only is it important to understand what the recipient is thinking feeling and doing as they receive the message but it is also important consider the objectives of the campaign in direct relation to these three actions. Fundamentally the marketing message should be created with these aspects in mind and specifically aim to direct the thoughts, feelings and actions of the audience.

Getting The Message Out There

The final element of the planning and creating the message is deciding how the message will be delivered to the audience. It is important to consider than different communications mediums will require adjustment to the way in which the marketing is presented. For example a direct mail message will differ from email marketing and telemarketing.

However, whilst it is vital to consider the different communications mediums; in today’s campaigns it is integrated campaigns, which take advantage of a multichannel approach which will return the largest rewards.

The message is at the core of your direct marketing campaign and requires a great deal of thought. This planning, which should take into account the communication channels, segments of data and audience profiles, if completed effectively will result in a message that is targeted, focussed towards the needs of the audience and subsequently has the greatest opportunity of success.

Direct Marketing Campaign Planning - Managing your Campaign Data

In our previous post detailing the basics of direct marketing campaign planning we highlighted the importance of identifying the USPs of your business, the objectives for the campaign and the necessity to define a target audience. With these planning elements complete however, it is also vital that you manage your campaign data effectively before, during and after the campaign.

The first step of effective data management for your direct marketing campaign is to source what data is available for your target market. This should include profiling information for the intended audience and in many instances will be available from data brokers. If buying data however it is vital that any data adheres to industry best practices, complies with ISO 27001 regulations for data protection reasons and is always the result of opt-in protocols.

With the data in your possession it is important to know how to use it; this means managing the data in a database which allows you carry out campaign activities and handle responses. At this point organisation is key; the data should be segmented into sets and cleansed to ensure that it is still relevant and timely. The cleansing and segmentation exercise should also install profiling flags which identify the specific profiles of a business or the customers (in B2B and B2C campaigns respectively).

If you have created intuitive segments they can then be used to run direct mail, telemarketing or email marketing campaigns which are aligned with the target segments and profiles, greatly improving the focus of your campaign and increasing the opportunity for gaining responses.

Handling responses is also a key element in managing your campaign database. As much as possible it is worth considering automated data capture by integrating technology such as IFrames into web enquiry forms as this has consistently proven successful. Additionally, it is worth instigating channel response codes in order to track and analyse the response rates for each communication channel throughout and after the campaign.

Setting up your campaign database correctly and implementing effective protocols for segmentation and response handling are both foundational elements in running a successful direct marketing campaign. Look out for our next post on creating the right message for your campaign to ensure it is targeted and focussed towards your audience’s needs.

Direct Marketing Campaign Planning – The Basics

Whilst it may be an overused business cliché “failure to plan, is planning to fail” and this is certainly true when it comes to your direct marketing campaigns. Ultimately your direct marketing creates a revenue stream, one that is vital to your business, its growth and development.

A logical approach to planning your direct marketing campaign will offer serious rewards and is a necessity. In the following approach, the first step is to consider your company, its objectives and also who the campaign is likely to target.

Your Business

It may sound strange when you are considering sending out communications to hundreds if not thousands of people, but the first stage of any marketing is to look inwards, studying your own business. This process should include focussing on the USPs of your business, identifying how your brand is perceived in the wider world and also, if the direct marketing is focussed towards a single product or service, objectively highlighting its selling points.

Your Objectives

Getting the objectives right for your marketing campaign is a fundamental aspect of planning. A misconceived campaign will fail, equally, a campaign with a focus that is too broad, is unlikely to provide the feedback you require.

Direct marketing campaigns can be focussed towards increasing the awareness of your brand, opening relationship opportunities with potential customers or delivering messages to existing customers in order to foster better relationships.

Additionally, you may be using the campaign to generate leads or simply to stimulate the market. Ultimately whatever the objectives are, the important point is to have predefined objectives that are relevant and will deliver added benefit.

Your Target Audience

By knowing the objectives you can then move on to deciding who to target. Whether the campaign is B2B or B2C this stage requires you to make the most of the data at your disposal, using this insight to develop target profiles, or “look-a- like” profiles for your marketing. If your targeting is executed effectively, you are giving your campaign material the best chances of success by ensuring it is placed into the hands of people that are the most statistically likely to respond.

This first element in your planning is about setting the foundations for your direct marketing campaign. Look out for future posts studying the other stages in the planning process including, Managing your Campaign Database, Getting the Campaign Message Right, Planning how to Handle the Campaign Responses and How to Learn From your Campaigns.

CRM is dead... long live PRM!

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a term which has long been used in sales and marketing circles to describe a methodology for acquiring, retaining and deepening customer relationships through targeted, personalised communications.

Or to put it more eloquently, Wikipedia defines CRM as:

“... a widely-implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes.”

Wikipedia also highlights that the overall goal of CRM activities is fourfold:
Firstly; to locate, attract and secure new clients
Secondly; to cultivate and retain existing clients
Thirdly; to bring former clients back to the business, and...
Fourthly; to reduce marketing and client servicing costs.

Where this definition differs from our own is that it focuses on the use of technology to achieve the end goals. Whilst we don’t necessarily disagree with this, at EWA we prefer to focus on the overall ‘CRM ethos’ i.e. how can we help our clients to get closer to their customers through the use of CRM led techniques and appropriate technology rather than thinking of CRM technology as being the panacea to all customer communication challenges. Customer Relationship Management technology is only ever as good as the people who use it and the data that goes in.

A conversation along these lines with a client recently sparked a new idea (and I must say it was hers not mine, so well done Talia at Wilshire Farm Foods!), shouldn’t we be thinking about Personal Relationship Management (PRM) and not just an all encompassing approach to customer management?

The Holy Grail for marketers has always been to properly, completely understand what makes customers tick and then use this information to talk to them about (and ultimately sell) products which are of interest. The practice of CRM goes some way to achieving this, but ‘traditional’ methods can still lump people together into segments which share broadly similar characteristics. Marketers will then often fall foul of sending communications via the channel that best suits them (or is the cheapest) and not necessarily the one which their customers prefer.

So what we’d like to advocate is a shift in mindset to a PRM approach – essentially each and every customer communication should adhere to the 3 Relevances:

• Relevance of channel
• Relevance of message
• Relevance of timing

If a communication can be sent at the right time, talking about things of interest via the right means it will ultimately improve customer relationships and remove the annoyance factor of untargeted, irrelevant marketing, something which is often underestimated in terms of negative brand impact.

And the technology to achieve this already in place, the integration of CRM systems and email marketing together with customer insight have brought customer communications on in leaps and bounds - Amazon is a fantastic example of this and how to use customer data to achieve highly personalised marketing. We’ve all spent more than we intended on Amazon as a result of their very sophisticated cross sell and up sell messaging (or is that just me?!)

So there you have it, it’s all about Personal Relationship Management and truly treating customers as individuals. We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this: is it just a utopian dream or can technology coupled with the right approach deliver the returns we’re all after?

Why Data Cleansing is So Important

Keeping databases cleansed so that they contain the most accurate and up to date records has always been important. Whilst it may be a labour intensive process the rewards make it wholly worthwhile, adding significant value to your marketing efforts and the understanding of your customers, or potential customers.

Data cleansing is about more than good housekeeping, removing duplicate or obsolete data and correcting inaccurate information. In today’s climate of data protection and financial pressure on marketing budgets the necessity for cleansed and accurate information is greater than ever. Here are just some of the important reasons to ensure your data is sufficiently cleansed.

Benefits of Data Cleansing:
• There are myriad financial benefits to cleansing your databases, not only will such activities stop you wasting money on storing old or obsolete data, but the improved accuracy can result in greater return on investment for your marketing activities.
• This greater accuracy in terms assists in your target profiling, meaning that your marketing campaigns will be more focussed, relevant and subsequently more likely to be successful. Understandably, using obsolete data for your targeting activities will only lead to misdirected campaigns.
• Storing old information can actually harm your brand image and customer perception. For instance, if you are consistently sending marketing literature to old addresses, customers that may have died or opted out of receiving promotional material, your efforts are actually helping to create a wider negative image, rather than return on investment.
• In modern business the Data Protection Act should always be a consideration, particularly in regards to the storage of personal information, where failure to cleanse can actually result in non-compliance. Subsequently, cleansing activities are necessary to eliminate any chances of breaching the Data Protection Act and hence any financial penalties.
• Finally, improving the quality of you data results in improved customer insight and adds considerable value to your marketing efforts by improving ROI.

These are just some of the reasons to undertake data cleansing, however, as a business it should be remembered that the process is ongoing, databases require practically constant management and cleansing to ensure they contain, up to date, accurate and valuable information.

Project Kaisei - Clearing the North Pacific

This is a little bit of a change to norm for the EWA blog but we have been asked by our fellow WPP agency Cohn & Wolfe to help by posting some information on Project Kaisei, an important initiative to stop the growing problem of plastic debris in the North Pacific.

Project Kaisei is a non-profit ocean clean-up initiative with a mission to stop the growing Plastic Vortex. The Plastic Vortex, otherwise known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is a huge accumulation of plastic debris in the North Pacific Gyre, containing large pieces of plastic and other rubbish.

This is a severe problem; previously referred to as the 8th continent and floating roughly one thousand miles off California’s coast, this plastic patch was estimated to be twice the size of Texas and growing.

Each year the Project Kaisei ship sets sail to research the Plastic Vortex and increase understanding of marine debris, its impact on our ocean environment and how we can introduce solutions for both prevention and cleanup. $2.7 million will be required to help cover the costs of the next voyage.

To help raise funds for the voyage, Cohn & Wolfe and Project Kaisei have created a 30 day campaign centred on a streaming video of Kai (pronounced Kī), a small goldfish involved in an epic battle against plastic pollution.

Via a 24-hour webcam consumers can follow Kai’s plight, living in an aquarium filled with plastic material, representing the Plastic Vortex. To “Save Kai” and remove plastic from his castle in the sea, participants can make donations via Facebook www.facebook.com/projectkaisei in as little as £5 increments from now through just after World Ocean’s Day on June 10.

As donations increase, the plastic debris in the aquarium decreases, creating a safe and plastic-free environment for Kai to enjoy. All proceeds from the campaign will go toward helping Project Kaisei fund scientific research and clean up expeditions.