Trade Show Marketers Still Embrace Direct Mail

A recent survey of exhibit managers and event marketers by Exhibitor magazine shows why direct mail continues as a promotional tool, as a companion rather than a victim of the growing use of e-mail and social media. Here are some insights we gleaned from those comments: First, the traditional rules of direct marketing continue to apply for direct mail success: Quality, targeted data is the most essential response factor. Mike Naples, business alliance manager for the United States Postal Service, reminds event marketers of the basics: "A successful campaign is 60% identifying the target, 30% making a compelling offer, and 10% creating a unique piece." Dan McAdams, vice president of sales and marketing for McAdams Graphics, is even more specific: "The most effective direct-mail projects start with a solid mailing list. A bad list yields a bad return." Second, e-mail is a mate, not a replacement, for snail mail. While acknowledging the growing use of e-mail, Holly Seese, global marketing communications manager at Celanese Corp., reminds Exhibitor readers that "hard-copy event invites are still more memorable than e-mailed ones." That can be especially true with an older target audience. "People over the age of 50 have an emotional attachment to letters that people under the age of 50 never developed," opines Keith Goodman, vice president for corporate solutions at Modern Postcard. More generally, e-mail faces headwinds in crowded, spam-filtered inboxes, while direct mail's lower volume actually boosts its impact: "Direct mail is back in vogue because few companies are using it. So a creative mailer is more likely to get read," explains Eugene Maresh, co-owner of Say it With Style Targeted Promotional Solutions. Or as Joy Gendusa, CEO of PostcardMania, sums up: "E-mail is brilliant for lead nurturing, but not for lead generation. If your message is seen as spam, you're hurting, not helping." Finally, creativity and a multi-channel mix are requirements for today's audiences. Direct mail creative must be personalized, relevantly targeted and eye-catching to engage response now. Tired tricks are not going to win interest. "An interesting shape is the best way to generate attention. Priority or overnight mail doesn't cut it anymore. It feels wasteful," asserts Rhea Cook, president of Ex Machina Design X Marketing. And because audiences also use multiple digital channels daily, they expect to engage with coordinated event promotion and response across channels, so direct mail can't go it alone if it is to be successful. Or as Jefferson Davis, trade show marketing and sales consultant at Competitive Edge, concludes: "People ask me all the time, 'What is the single best media for exhibit marketing?' But there is no single best media. The magic is in the mix." For more, see http://www.acculistusa.com/why-direct-mail-still-wins-allegiance-of-trade-show-marketers/

Direct Mail Still Powers Nonprofit Fundraising

Interest in direct mailing lists and services from AccuList USA's nonprofit clients remains strong despite the growing share of donor dollars collected via online giving. Some of the reasons that fundraising pros stay committed to mail power are cited in a recent article for The NonProfit Times by Mark Hrywna. Despite the growing share of donations attributed to online giving, Steve MacLaughlin, vice president of data and analytics at fundraising tech firm Blackbaud, stresses that online giving is still less than 10% of all charitable giving. Fundraisers need to avoid confusing the channel of engagement with the channel of transaction, he advises. Direct mail response certainly is no longer limited to mailed donations as many direct mail recipients go online to give; similarly, a mobile-device outreach or e-mail appeal can generate offline gifts. Even in an increasingly digital world, a good multi-channel mix will include direct mail. Hrywna cites Make-a-Wish Foundation as an example of that continued direct mail investment. When Chief Financial Officer Paul Mehlhorn started with Make-A-Wish Foundation in 2009, he recalls that he was told direct mail was a dinosaur that would be gone in five or six years. Yet last year the national office exceeded 2009 direct mail revenue by several million dollars, going from $13.9 million to $15.3 million. "It looks to me like a program that can stay very strong for the next 10 to 15 years," Mehlhorn asserts to Hrywna. In fact, Mehlhorn says he may expand on his direct mail investment: "As you get past the low-hanging fruit, [online] becomes almost as costly as direct mail. Unless you enlarge your donor pool, you’re going to be spending about the same." Plus, there are some areas where direct mail retains an edge, such as planned giving. Make-A-Wish Foundation has seen revenue from planned gifts just about triple during the past four years, growing from about $2 million to $6 million, and Mehlhorn credits part of that success to actively promoting planned giving in direct mail as well as online campaigns. “A lot of the folks now making end-of-life plans are still in that generation that likes getting mail,” he points out. See the full blog post at http://www.acculistusa.com/direct-mail-still-powers-fundraising-especially-planned-giving/

Demographics Fuel Pet-Owner Spending, Marketing

Direct mail and e-mail lists and data services targeting pet owners are one of AccuList USA's high-demand markets, and we expect trends in pet ownership to grow that marketing interest--and the competition that makes quality data and targeting even more essential. A recent post for The Marketing Insider highlights the demographic trends that are making pet owners such attractive targets: "Americans now own 305 million cats and dogs, an increase of 85 million over the past 10 years. The 50+ demographic is responsible for 60% of that growth. With 50+ population expected to grow twice as rapidly as the 18-49 segment over the next 10 years, brands that include 50+ pet owners in their marketing strategies will improve their odds of maximizing revenue growth," asserts columnist Mark Bradbury. Bradbury makes the point that marketers hoping to cash in on the older pet-owning market will need to adjust their buyer profiles given that 50+ pet owners are mainly empty-nesters (80%), retired (one-in-three), and three times more likely than younger pet owners to be divorced, widowed or separated--leaving more time and disposable income to devote to pet members of the family. Bradbury points to statistical proof that older owners are on a pet-spending splurge: People 50+ spent over $15.6 billion on their pets in the last year, more than all of the other generations combined, according to PetBusinessProfessor.com. The opportunity to market pet-pampering products is expanding, but so is the competition. Bradbury suggests several tactics that put the focus squarely on the growing Baby Boomer pet market, including messaging that celebrates a pet-centric Boomer lifestyle. Multi-channel campaigning is a must for this market. In addition to digital marketing via online, social and e-mail, Boomers are also still heavy users, and responders, of direct mail, magazines and television, Bradbury points out. "Synergistic cross-media marketing plans" are required to maximize reach at every stage in the purchase funnel, he advises. Plus, though Boomers like to spend to dote on their pets, they also want to spend wisely and are attracted to savings opportunities. Direct marketers will want to include discounts or loyalty reward programs to win brand fans. For a link to more pet marketing suggestions, see http://www.acculistusa.com/demographic-trends-drive-growth-in-pet-owner-spending/

Why You Should De-dupe Your Data

Anna Kayfitz, CEO of StrategicDB Corp., recently offered AccuList USA this expert advice on why direct marketing success requires de-duping data: 

In today’s data-driven marketing, data is not only the most important asset that your company can have but can also make or break your campaign. Having clean data impacts not only marketing activities but also impacts your reputation, operations and decision-making. De-duping is one of the most important aspects of overall data hygiene. Duplicates can be found on many levels of data; they arise at the household level, individual e-mail level or company level. If you are not convinced that you need to de-dupe, consider the following five benefits. First, you can avoid different offers to the same customer. For example, you send two different direct mail creatives to the same household. As one of the records was a customer, you decided to provide a returning customer 15% off, while the other record was marked as a prospect and only got 10% off. Now the person opening both direct mails will be confused by having two different discounts, and the company also can face a PR nightmare. Second, you can cut unnecessary cost. For example, assume you are doing a direct mail creative which costs you $5 per mailing. Your list contains 10,000 recipients. The total cost of mailings therefore is $50,000. If you decided to de-dupe, you would find out that 10% of your mailing list was duplicated. Therefore, $5,000 was a waste of resources. It would have been much cheaper to de-dupe prior to deploying your campaign. Third, you will get better analytics for decision-making. Analytics is important not just from a perspective of understanding how your marketing and sales is performing but also from a decision-making perspective. By having duplicates in your CRM, you are going to be double-counting your list capabilities, miscalculating your true growth rates, and getting the wrong rate of responses. If you are looking to make a decision on future campaigns, basing it on duplicate data will will give you the wrong list count, wrong budget and possibly the wrong creative picked (especially if you are basing it on an A/B testing done previously). Next, de-duping helps prevent customer service confusion when clients call in, e-mail or come into the store. For example, Mary Smith is found twice in your CRM with the same phone number. She calls in to your customer support to inquire about her order status. Your customer service rep decides to pull up the customer account by phone number and finds two records. Now she has to put the customer on hold while she checks both accounts to try to locate the last purchase before she can even assist the customer. Not only is it wasting everyone’s time and making customer service inefficient, it also makes the customer have a bad customer service experience. Finally, the biggest impact that duplicates have on your business is a potential loss of sale. If you have duplicates, you do not have a true view of all prospect or customer activities. Therefore, you could be excluding prospects from a sales call because your lead scoring system indicated that they are not ready. However, if the data from both records was combined, you would have all signals indicating they are ready to be passed on to sales. With duplicates, by the time you figure it out, a customer may have already lost interest and gone with your competitor. De-duping should be part of your data-cleaning initiative, either prior to any major campaign or on a yearly basis. You can easily de-dupe your list by using a de-duping tool that will require less effort to identify duplicates and establish a master record than is required to deal with the consequences of duplicate data. For more help, see http://www.acculistusa.com/why-you-should-de-dupe-your-data/

Case Studies Showcase Museum & Zoo Direct Mail

AccuList USA provides mailing lists and direct marketing support for a growing number of museum and zoo marketers, and we thought our museum and zoo clients, and other nonprofit marketers, would be interested in recent case studies of how combining direct mail with digital marketing can successfully drive gift membership purchases. The case studies were presented by The Lukens Company, a nonprofit agency, for the American Museum Membership Conference. Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo was concerned that its costly traditional direct mail letter package promoting gift memberships was experiencing declining ROI and relied on a complex process for signup. Tasked with finding solutions, the agency came up with a new two-drop postcard combined with a three-part e-mail series timed after a Cyber Monday campaign. The campaign directed recipients to an online signup with a promo code to track gift sales.  Targeting prior gift membership purchasers and offering a standard $15 discount, the new approach resulted in a 173% increase in number of purchases and 88% increase in revenue. A similar strategy provided positive ROI results for a gift membership drive by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in its first holiday season after reopening following a three-year closure. Marketers faced a dual challenge: fatigue of the traditional direct mail package to the existing gift membership audience, plus a new audience unfamiliar with SFMOMA gift membership offerings. Seeking to energize both targets, the agency's creative shifted from the traditional package to a two-drop postcard and five-part e-mail series, directing recipients online to a new custom landing page, along with phone and onsite support. Mailing to current members, lapsed members, and general admission and event ticket buyers, the campaign offered 10% off gift memberships for members and prospects who became members. For more ways direct mail can drive results, more case studies and samples of actual creative go to http://www.acculistusa.com/case-studies-showcase-zoo-museum-direct-mail-strategy/

P&C Insurance Continues to Embrace Direct Mail

Direct mail by property and casualty insurance clients continues as a staple of our list brokerage and data services business, and so we were pleased to see a Valentine's Day love note to P&C direct mail from the marketing consultants at IWCO Direct. The IWCO post notes that nearly 400 insurance companies mailed more than 5.7 billion pieces of mail in 2017, according to Comperemedia. The property and casualty insurance category accounted for 53% of that volume, with more than 3 billion pieces of direct mail mailed by 110 companies. Of those direct mail packages, 95% were Marketing Mail (formerly called Standard Mail), mainly for acquisition (89%). Comperemedia and Competiscan data highlighted trends revealed by those direct mail packages, too.  With 55% of policyholders likely to shop around for insurance as a policy comes up for renewal, smart insurance providers are taking a proactive approach and contacting policyholders in advance to remind them why they should remain with their current P&C insurance provider. Also to woo shoppers, both in acquisition and renewal, insurance promotions are direct about savings messages and competitor pricing comparisons. Finally, the industry's continued embrace of direct mail does not ignore the digital revolution; in fact, direct mail packages are highlighting the industry's growing self-service digital functionality for policyholders. Leveraging industry trends and success stories, IWCO lists three basic tactics proven to boost response for P&C acquisition and cross-sell mailings: 1) Comparison charts touting coverage benefits over those of top competitors; 2) Promotional cards with a clear call-to-action via website, mobile app, and/or toll-free phone; and 3) An eye-catching personalized tagline. See http://www.acculistusa.com/pc-insurance-embraces-direct-mail-response/

Millennials Reshape Event Success Strategies

As the millennial cohort expands event attendance, trade show and conference marketers and performing arts marketers are beginning to change their targeting, messaging and event planning strategies to cater to a demographic that demands technological multi-channel savvy, interest-specific targeting and experiential interactivity. A recent post by UK-based Conference News highlights strategies that event professionals can adopt to woo the millennial audience. While millennials are known for their social media, mobile-phone-addicted personae, studies show that these digital preferences can actually fuel greater live event interest; Conference News cites one survey showing 73% of millennials consider live event attendance as a way to express their beliefs and personality online. But it also means that event planners need to take cues from their digital experiences. Since millennials flock to online platforms that offer a nexus of various interests and connectivity, an event that focuses too narrowly can misfire. Conference News argues for a "multi-faceted event" and cites North Carolina's Moogfest as an example. Moogfest is primarily a music festival, but, in 2016, it added a stage for workshops, installations and discussions of the current political climate. By combining art, activism, food/drink, and activities in one place, it addressed attendees' multiple passions and created more social media fodder and buzz at the same time. Meeting the millennial demand for a multi-faceted event experience can also require going beyond hotel conference rooms and exhibit spaces. In 2017, the demand for non-traditional spaces rose by 3.8%, notes the article. Millennials are technically savvy and expect technically savvy event support. The Conference News article cites three event technology ideas likely to gain ground this year: 1) RFID (radio-frequency identification) wristbands can speed up entry lines and allow purchases without cash or cards; 2) Mobile Event Apps can let attendees craft customized experiences via eased navigation, personalized schedules, push notifications about upcoming activities, and social sharing with other attendees; and 3) Artificial Intelligence (AI) can use chat bots to answer attendee questions and, in coordination with social-media-based event app info, generate personalized on-site recommendations. See the full post at http://www.acculistusa.com/millennial-attendees-reshape-event-success-strategies/