By David L. Rawle
Marketing

Direct marketing is more relevant than ever thanks, in part, to the Internet. But it’s also thanks to vast improvements in data mining and analytics.

You can now identify your customers and prospects with incredible precision. You can identify who and where they are, their demographics, spending and lifestyle patterns, not to mention their motivations.

Here are some tips on how to maximize the effectiveness of this dynamic medium:

Know your target. Direct marketing analytics are improving at lightning speed. We regularly use highly sophisticated systems not only to profile customers but also use that same information to identify additional prospects and understand how they live and, perhaps more importantly, what drives their purchase decisions.

Be personal. Use that customer/prospect data to make your message as personal as possible. The old anonymous “Dear Friend” pitch is, or should be, dead. It doesn’t work.

Remember that we live in a world of increasing customization and personalization. You need to call your customers by name, and you need to tell them something that is relevant specifically to them.

Be timely. Timeliness is more important than ever. The cable channels rush to be the first with breaking news, no matter how trivial.

We are all incredibly time-sensitive. Time and relate your message to today’s news, not yesterday’s.

Be opportunistic. If there’s a snowstorm in Chicago, promote your South Carolina vacation to those folks the same day.

Be relevant. Being personal and timely helps you be relevant. It also helps to engage your prospect with information that is useful and/or to provide an offer that is especially attractive.

Remember, people are bombarded with thousands of messages every day. You need to cut through all of that. Give your prospects a reason, and an incentive, to respond.

Be integrated. For-profit direct marketers learned this a long time ago. But nonprofit institutions have been slow to get it. Direct marketing alone is not enough. Integrated marketing is essential to maximizing results.

Complement your direct marketing initiative with other appropriate media and public relations.

Be consistent. Before the Internet took off, you could get away with discreet campaigns: one look in your advertising and another in your direct marketing. But now, forget about it. Your presence on the Internet defines you to the entire world.

Your direct marketing had better conform to it, or you will confuse your prospects and diminish your results. There’s another aspect to consistency that is interesting and challenging: your direct marketing e-mails have a better chance of getting opened if you make them look like other e-mails that your prospects regularly open.

In advertising, the reverse is more likely to be true: that is, we tend to notice ads that do not look like the other ads we’re viewing. See, this stuff isn’t all that easy after all!

Be visually powerful. The look of direct marketing is also more important than ever. This is because we live in a more visual world and are exposed to so many amazingly creative and astounding visual images every day. There’s great creativity in even the simplest direct marketing piece. Compellingly designed, it could yield substantially better results.

Be patient. Cultivation is a critical part of direct marketing, as it is in all marketing. I’m always amazed when organizations assume they can send only one solicitation to “qualified” prospects and yield an impressive result. Consider the panhandler. He asks everyone for spare change. Virtually everyone he asks is perfectly capable of responding affirmatively, but very few do so. Why? No cultivation. It is so very important to cultivate a relationship with prospects before and after a transaction. Bond with a customer and you’ve got a customer for life.

Continuously improve. Direct marketing is highly measurable. Study your results, learn from them, and continuously refine your programs. Then you should get even better results next time.

David L. Rawle is chairman of Charleston-based Rawle-Murdy Associates Inc., a marketing, advertising and public relations firm. E-mail him at drawle@rawlemurdy.com or visit his blog at davidrawle.blogspot.com.

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