When I first got into Marketing, it was product-focused. As market technology became more prevalent - first as Database Marketing, then as CRM - the insights forced a shift to becoming customer-focused. And that made sense - and produced a lot of revenue.

I’ve been pondering the customer-focus with the advent and expansion of social media. Advances in crawling, text mining, and aggregation tools have brought us as close to one-to-one marketing as we’ve ever been. So that got me to thinking, if we truly know who the customer is, then isn’t it time to tell them about our products?

Think about it. We became customer focused because we didn’t know much about the customer. Now that we know so much more, perhaps we should try to sell them something too. After all, if we know so much let’s just tell them about our products and services.  Just a thought.

For more inquisitive insight, visit me at the DMA in October- Booth #1204

Just this week, I was on the receiving end of the best B2B campaign I’ve seen in years – and had to fire off this posting to you without delay, given the valuable marketing lessons to be learned from it.

A seemingly hand addressed brown paper envelope was delivered to me.

Inside… a hotel key and a note offering a web address. It intrigued me – had I won a prize? (Of course I knew I hadn’t. But nevertheless, I was impressed by the mystery. How could anyone not be?)

So I took the bait and visited the site. It was a hotel micro-site inviting me to review a simple hotel restaurant menu and “construct” my perfect meal. Very cool interactive content.

Once I completed this menu , the true nature of the campaign was revealed. Both mailer and site were a demonstration of the prowess of VLG - clearly a very interesting interactive agency! VLG pointed out that I had not only engaged with the site, but revealed critical information about myself along the way (steak, not chicken!).

Moments after completing the site’s online form I received a call from VLG.

So what can you take away from this top-flight campaign? Five key components:

1. Accurate Targeting: I lead sales and marketing at AccuData. I’m the perfect target for this agency

2. Attention-Getting Opener: Marketers know unusual mail pieces have a better chance of being opened. Boxes are the best but a hand-addressed brown paper envelope is very good.

3. Irresistible call-to-action: the hotel key was a unique way to spur the desired response… my visit to the URL.

4. Show, don’t tell: The mailer didn’t tell me what VLG could do. It showed me the proof in a memorable way. And that made all the difference.

5. Fast follow-up: By calling just moments after my site visit, VLG reached me at the peak of my interest when they were still top-of-mind. Definitely a best practice.

Was the campaign expensive? Sure. But VLG could never have driven that response from me with email or a more traditional mail piece. B2B direct marketing can often support more expensive promotional costs because of the relatively large value of a sale.

Check out another great mail piece I’ve reviewed: “Dear Mr. Goff” isn’t even close - let’s get variable

A client recently asked AccuData to develop a predictive model to help target a large national direct mail and email campaign. Notice the request was to develop “a” predictive model - we actually wound up building ten, and despite the incremental cost of building ten vs. one, they drove sky-high ROI for the campaign.

Why did we do this and why did it deliver economically?

Predictive models built for a national prospect universe assume that individuals or households with similar characteristics behave the same way in each MSA. They don’t. Many marketers approach this problem by asking their analytics team to include a geographic factor, essentially asking their team to make sure the predictive model includes a factor for geography. But this is often a mistake.

First, in many cases the geographic factor is weak compared to other key elements (e.g., demos, lifestyle factors). In this case the geographic factor falls out of the model. Alternatively the geographic factor could be so strong that other important variables fall out of the model.

What works?

In our experience the best way to address the challenge is to build distinct models for each key market. In this way a weak, but potentially important geographic factor, is incorporated into your targeting. At the same time a strong geographic factor is incorporated because you will develop models at the MSA level (or some other geo level).

If you are a large marketer you must fight for every 1/100th of a percent of response. In our experience, building localized models for key markets delivers critical competitive advantage.

Thought I was talking about a cocktail? I’m talking about social media and how it’s being used to create buzz for your product or service and how this in turn can generate leads and new business for your company.

This Wednesday, July 15th  at  2 p.m. EST, AccuData hosts the sixth installment of our Selling Skills webinar series “Prospecting via Social Networking.”  We’re using social media internally at AccuData and we are getting results.

So click here to join us.

Direct mail and email used together in a multi-channel campaign can work wonders for your ROI - or sink it. 

No doubt, email is HOT and AccuData helps many companies develop and execute multi-channel campaigns involving email and direct mail.  But I find myself advising clients quite frequently NOT to marry email and direct mail – at least not in the way we are often asked to do it - which is to simultaneously drop email and direct mail together to the same list. 

Why?

The problem is that a careful economic analysis often shows that while the output metric of such an approach is often better (e.g., response rate), the ROI can be much worse.  Think about this simple math:

Let’s say your champion approach is a direct mail program that generates a 1% response rate at a cost of $0.50 per piece.  Now you layer on email and the cost of doing this is $0.05 or 10% of the direct mail cost.  That means your total response needs to be 1.1% to break even.  Make sense?

But in reality the cost of email can be higher, especially if you are prospecting for businesses or other targets that require you to purchase managed or specialty email lists.  So the cost could be more than 10%, maybe 20% or more.  So now you need a 1.2% response rate to break even.  Now that just covers the cost of the email – we’ve not factored in other costs such as the cost to develop the email creative, the cost to develop an effective website or landing page, etc. 

It is possible to generate incremental lift of 10% or 20% by coupling email with direct mail in the same drop - absolutely.  But in many cases we don’t see this result and the campaign winds up driving more sales, but at a higher cost per sale.

Now there IS a potentially better way to use email effectively in tandem with direct mail.  It’s called channel switching.  I’ll blog about that next time.

An avatar represents the chosen alternative personna of an individual. It is important because it can be an indication of a behavior and/or lifestyle of individuals in your target market. Although it is not (yet) possible to link an avatar with a real person, it is important to recognize that through an avatar, individuals are offering up additional lifestyle and behavior information about themselves.

So why are avatars important? Avatars often do not represent a pure demographic. Rather, they represent lifestyles and behaviors. When translating this to marketing, it is clear that demographics alone do not define a market segment. Lifestyles and behaviors capture the true essence of an individual. Therefore these factors must be included in your market segmentation strategy.

This week AccuData launched a new product called Snapshot.  It’s a big deal around here.  What is it?

Snapshot is an ecommerce application on our leads site, www.acculeads.com.  Snapshot allows a user to upload a customer list (b2B, B2C) at which point the system automatically appends data (demos, lifestyle, SIC division for B2B lists, etc.) and produces a profile report or a “Snapshot” of the uploaded customers if you will.  Beyond producing the profile, Snapshot automatically scores a target geographic area for prospects that statistically look just like the customers uploaded into the application - leads that are available for purchase online.

For many of our clients Snapshot is a big step-up from simple selects or heuristic targeting methods.  The Snapshot approach applies statistical rigor and can improve lift while at the same time providing a good deal of information helpful in channel selection and in the development of creative and offers.

What really excites me about Snapshot is that we’re offering what was formerly a time consuming analytics process on the web with extremely attractive economics.