Imagine you are one click away. Your latest direct mail campaign’s performance numbers are in. The air is charged with electricity. All the hours, days, and weeks of planning, preparing, and executing the campaign have come down to this moment. You open the final campaign report, scanning the numbers. Yes, there it is! What you’ve been waiting to see all along – great results, improved response rates, and a high ROI. You’re thrilled! This is what you and your whole team have been working towards, and it paid off big time.
As a marketer or printer, you are on the great quest to deliver and improve results for your clients. It’s a continuous process; a journey without end, and the challenge of it all is immensely satisfying. Marketing channels and methods are always evolving with new trends constantly emerging.
How do you stay on top of it? How do you improve your direct mail results?
One of the greatest tools at your disposal is your customer data. When used correctly, you can identify who your top customers are, find new prospects who look just like them, and create relevant, eye-catching advertisements. Let’s look at how data analytics can help you improve your direct mail performance.
Better Prospects
Who you target with your mail piece is critical to the campaign’s success. Find top prospects for your company with a MicroModel® analysis. This analysis studies your high value customers and creates an in-depth customer profile. You can use this data model to score marketing lists and locate the prospect records that look identical to your top customers. Each record is ranked, so instead of taking a random selection, you can choose the highest scoring records to target for your campaign.
When you select higher quality records, you are marketing to the people who are most likely to buy from you. This gives your campaign the highest chance for success.
Active Zones
Each marketing area will have active and inactive zones. By doing a geographical study of your marketing territory, you can identify which neighborhoods are responding to your campaigns and which ones are not. If no one has responded for quite some time, it is a waste of resources to continue targeting that neighborhood. Remove inactive zones from your marketing list and focus on the areas that are responding to your offers.
You can even analyze your active zones, creating a geographical profile, so you can find other neighborhoods that look just like them. This data analysis will aid you in making more strategic, data-driven decisions as you expand your territory.
Limits
You can continue to target everyone on your list, but at some point, you will see diminishing returns. Data analysis can identify exactly where that point is. Are 80% of your customers coming from within a 5-mile radius? If so, there’s no point in going out 10 miles just to reach all of them. Perhaps you are in a more rural area, and you realize that 80% of your customers come from within a 15-mile radius, and you need to expand your territory.
By understanding where you see diminishing returns, you can establish healthy parameters for your territory. Focus on your high performing areas and maximize the return on your investments.
Response Data
If you want to improve your direct mail performance, you need to know what’s working and what’s not. Collect response and transaction data throughout each campaign. Match up your response data to your mail list to see who was targeted and responded. How do your responders align to your customer profile?
This information should be fed back into your data model, so you can refine the model and hone-in on even better prospects in the next campaign.
Next Steps
These are just a few of the many steps you can take to improve your direct mail performance. If you’re ready to improve results, give us a call. Our team is here to help you find the best course of action for your business.