Thursday, January 2, 2014

Direct Mail Is Still Strongest Donation Motivator

Direct mail remains the best channel for prompting donations, outperforming social media and e-mail, according to the latest survey by global research company YouGov. The study found that 21% of Americans cited direct mail solicitations as the prompt for their most recent gift. Direct mail is particularly successful with the over-55 age group, with 25% making their last gift in response to direct mail, compared to only 14% of 18- to 34-year-olds. Lower income households also respond strongly to direct mail marketing, with 29% of those earning $40,000 or less responding to direct mail for their last donation, compared to only 18% of those earning $80,000+. In contrast, social media has yet to take off as a major giving prompt, with only 6% of adults responding for their last gift. However, social media is becoming a more significant motivator for the 18- to 34-year-old demographic, with 11% responding to social media for their last donation, compared to only 3% of those 55+. E-mail does a little better in motivating donors, with 10% of Americans saying it moved them to make their last gift. E-mail works especially well for charities supporting the arts, with 25% of their donors in the last 12 months saying they were particularly likely to respond to e-mail. For more detail, see the news story and release at http://www.sacbee.com/2013/12/18/6010758/direct-mail-is-still-the-strongest.html

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Forrester Urges Refocus on Customer Needs

It's time to make some New Year's marketing resolutions. A recent Forrester Research report prompts one good goal for 2014: Put customer needs ahead of the latest "shiny object" technology or channel. Complexity, technology faddism, and a disconnected entrepreneurial culture are slowing marketers down, yielding bad data, duplicating integration costs, and ultimately creating a poor-quality experience for customers, researchers warn. Forrester urges marketers to adopt a clear strategy focused on customers’ needs, and suggests these steps to success: Select a target customer and focus on a customer life cycle stage; identify the fundamental customer need(s) to fulfill and what benefit(s) customers want next; explore how to deliver these benefits in a technology-agnostic manner; then select the desired delivery method to develop, commission, or license; and make sure to set key performance indicators (KPIs). Pretty basic, right? But some marketers, overwhelmed by emerging technologies and channels, and fearful of being trumped by competitors, are forgetting basics in the rush to embrace hot new marketing tactics. By failing to aim at the only target that counts--the customer--they risk costly marketing misses. See the MediaPost article on how to refocus on customers in the year ahead: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/211410/forrester-offers-seven-steps-to-better-marketing.html