Influential direct marketing - 3 ingredients make it right

Whether it's promotions, email marketing or print mail campaigns, marketers need three key factors to bake direct marketing campaigns.

Offers, data and ideas are three inputs that marketers can use to make a campaign successful. Ideally, marketers should strive to achieve above-average scores in at least two of these three categories to get a return on investment.

Quote.

This offer requires sufficient perceived value to motivate the purchase. According to my experience, instant gratification gives a better job than a large win.

Study the giveaway to make sure it doesn't appear in other competitions. The Flash thumb drive and iPod quickly became the name of the free giveaway.

The offer must be simple and there are not too many conditions, so you can communicate in one title. If the offer is strong, please use it as the focus of your creative. If the offer is not appealing, play it and use the other elements in the creative to reach the recipient.

Creativity.

The mechanism of direct mail, the choice of hero image, the copy and the wording provided will have an impact on the outcome. If it is an email marketing campaign, the subject line plays a key role. Bad ideas can disappoint you. Similarly, great ideas cannot save crappy promotions.

The audience will find some buzzwords such as "free", "win", "immediate" and so on. While some of these phrases may conflict with brand guidelines, promotions are expected to be short-term and require retail.

Please note where to target call-to-action. Should it appear early in the creative, or is it the last?

data.

The first way to improve database integrity is to clear the name that is not selected to receive marketing communications. In the short term, this will reduce the size of the database. But in the long run, this will provide better openness and reduce reliance on offers and ideas.

Especially for direct marketing, this piece needs to feel like it is talking to the individual. It is very important to face the data. It's easy to process data as a commodity - the record is uploaded to the software, cleaned and then blasted. 6,000 people start to look like 6,000 email addresses.

Try to focus on the data instead of running the statistics tool separately. Look for patterns: age, career, company or personal email address. All these clues give you insight into who they are.

But unless we can understand them well for meaningful conversation, they won't listen. If the difference is large enough, it makes sense to divide the group into smaller sections.

Adjust until pain

Finally, put yourself in the recipient's seat. Remove your marketing/corporate goggles and ask yourself, ' How will our audience view this idea? '

Study every nuance of creativity. God is in the details. No matter how smart the strategy, typos and eyes will distract the reader.

Visualize any single idea in situ, not isolated. For example, if you are doing an email marketing campaign, grab the screen capture of your email inbox and insert the email subject line in your marketing section. See how it reads in the chaotic ocean. Is it as hard to beat as on the copy table?

It is vital. If it doesn't catch you, it may not be boring enough. Adjust until pain.

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