Response Rate, Cost Per Lead, Cost Per Sale

When you are evaluating the success of your print and multichannel marketing campaigns, how do you know which channels are most effective? How do you know which channels (or combination of channels) are delivering the most bang for the buck?

To answer this question, marketers often look at response rate, cost per lead, and cost per sale. What’s the difference between them?

Response rate is how many people responded to your campaign. If you mailed 5,000 postcards and 500 people responded, your response rate is 10%. Those 500 people then become leads.
Cost per lead is how much it costs you to get that lead. Let’s say that direct mail campaign cost you $5,000. With 500 responses, each response (or lead) cost you $10 ($5,000 / 500).

Not every one of these leads will turn into a sale. Let’s say you were able to convert 30% or 167 of those leads.  When you divide $5,000 by 167, you find that your cost per sale is $30.

Which one of these numbers is most important? All of them! Why? If your average sale is $35, you have barely broken even on this campaign. To improve your results, you could lower the costs next time or you could try one of these three things:

1. Increase the response rate to bring more sales into the funnel, lowering your cost per lead
2. Increase the conversion rate, lowering your cost per sale
3. Tweak the offer or incentive to increase the average revenues per sale to lower your breakeven point.

There are lots of ways to evaluate the success of a marketing campaign and improve your results. Let us analyze your results and brainstorm ideas to get the most out of your marketing dollars!

~ Kelly Mank, President of Time4Printing, Kelly@Time4Printing.com
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Survey Results: Direct Mail on the Rise for Customer Acquisition & Retention

Every year, Target Marketing conducts its Media Usage Survey. In this survey, the magazine asks how readers are allocating their budgets, which channels are increasing and decreasing, and which channels its readers prefer for a variety of marketing activities.

While digital, social, and mobile media continue their astronomic growth trajectory, this year’s survey finds that direct mail is holding its own, and strongly. In particular, direct mail is growing for customer acquisition and retention. 

•    In 2015, 54% of Target Marketing respondents were using direct mail for their customer acquisition efforts. In 2016, this rose to 58%.
•    In 2015, 51% of Target Marketing respondents were using direct mail for their customer retention efforts. That has risen to 55% today. 

Why is direct mail growing for acquisition and retention, even in the face of consumers’ love affair with digital and mobile media? 

1. Email addresses go out of date very quickly, and mobile phone numbers are not always easy to get. Once you have a physical address, however, you can maintain contact with that customer for a long time. Even if people move and don’t provide a new address, you can get address updates from the U.S. Post Office through the National Change of Address (NCOA) service.

2. Even when someone has opted out of phone, email, and mobile contact, you can still reach them by postal mail. Direct mail is powerful and proven effective for re-engaging customers who have dropped off your email list.

3. In a world of electronic media, the physical mailbox is a powerful open door. When a well-designed mail piece shows up in a customer’s or prospect’s mailbox, it doesn’t get lost the way emails in the saturated and highly filtered inbox do.  It gets noticed right away—and nearly always read.

Want help using direct mail to break through the clutter and get attention? Give us a call at 207-894-5600!

 ~ Kelly Mank, President of Time4Printing, Kelly@Time4Printing.com
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how readers are allocating their budgets, which channels are increasing and decreasing, and which channels its readers prefer for a variety of marketing activities.

Don’t Ditch Your Data — Fix It!

Think you don't own enough data to do personalized marketing? That might not be the case. Often

The first step is to figure out exactly where you are and what you need to do. This often involves contacting a data specialist who can analyze your data. While this sounds daunting, it’s really no different than taking your car to a repair shop. The mechanic hooks up the car to a machine that spits out a report telling you where the problems are. Data specialists do much the same thing.

One data specialist gives the example of a data profile it created for a Canadian retailer. The retailer had plenty of data and wanted to use it for 1:1 print marketing, so the data specialist ran a data audit. One of the most glaring challenges that immediately came to light was that the retailer had addresses for only 50% of its customers. It did, however, have phone numbers. The data specialist contacted a list house that maps phone numbers to names and addresses provided the retailer with the missing information.

In another example, the data specialist found that each one of the retailer’s stores was gathering customer data in isolation. Each retail customer might have two, three, even five different customer IDs, one for each store in which they shopped. Once again, telephone numbers came to the rescue. The data specialist used each shopper’s telephone number as a common point of contact to consolidate each shopper’s data from each store into a single marketing database.

Seemingly overwhelming problems often have simple solutions. A basic diagnostic test is often half the battle. So if you think your data needs a check-up, don’t panic. Let us coordinate the project so that you get just the solution you need.

marketers do own enough data, but that data is not centralized or is incomplete or inaccurate. If you fall into the latter category, the answer isn’t ditching your dreams of personalization. It’s fixing the problems in your data.

 ~ Kelly Mank, President of Time4Printing, Kelly@Time4Printing.com
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Tap the Subconscious, Win the Sale!

Want to create direct mail that motivates to action? Take some tips from the advertising industry.

These tips are based on human psychology that smart advertisers know.

1. Don’t miss out! People like to be part of something new. If something exciting is going on, they don’t want to be left behind. “Join the millions of Americans who have discovered...”
2. Offer exclusivity. Consumers want their lives to be glamorous. They want to feel that they deserve something special. “Not everyone gets this deal, so apply today!” Exclusivity and insider status appeal to readers’ sense of pride and entitlement and can be powerful motivators.
3. Create value by association. Advertisers will often associate a product or service with something universally accepted as noble or being of great value. Jeep recently tapped this approach with its Super Bowl ads tying Jeep to the gritty images of the faces of America’s soldiers.
4. Appeal to charity or environmental causes. “Help us take care of America’s lost and abandoned pets. With every purchase, we will donate . . .” Who could say “no” to one of these sad-faced, abandoned creatures? No one, of course.
5. Give proof positive. Every marketer makes claims about their products, but when you back them up with statistics, those claims carry more punch. A mattress company might appeal to data from studies on sleep, for example (“Did you know that people who sleep soundly are 10% more productive at work?”) or a men’s suit company might talk about the percentage of executives who form opinions of job candidates within the first two seconds.

Consumers are motivated by a wide variety of factors, and many of them are subconscious. Tap into different motivators in your messaging and see which ones are most effective with your target audience.

 ~ Kelly Mank, President of Time4Printing, Kelly@Time4Printing.com
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Find Where Data Is Hiding

Think you don’t have enough data to drive personalized print marketing programs? To boost your
targeting and personalization efforts, maybe you need to invest in data gathering or purchasing third-party list. Or maybe — just maybe — you have more data than you think.

Let’s look at some of the many types of data that can get overlooked.
•    Transactional data. This includes both brick-and-mortar and from the online store.
•    Submissions through web contact forms.
•    Customer care (found in your CRM system)
•    Business reply cards. Too often, your BRCs are left at the fulfillment house and the valuable information that can be obtained from them is left unused.
•    SMS/cell phone marketing contacts. If you have a standalone system, get that information out of your text marketing solution and back into your CRM.
•    Responses to e-mail campaigns. Like text messaging, these data need to get back into your marketing database so what you learn through email contacts can be integrated into your direct mail and other channels, too.
•    Trade shows/events. Get those “card swipe” responses back into your system after post-show follow-up!
•    Customer and prospect surveys.

Aggregating the data from these disparate sources will give you a more well-rounded picture of your customers and target audience. This data can be cleaned up, de-duped, and filled in if necessary so that you can use it to create more relevant communications and drive sales.

If you need help locating or integrating data from all of these disparate sources, give us a call. We can help!

 ~ Kelly Mank, President of Time4Printing, Kelly@Time4Printing.com
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Get Your Timing Right!

How critical is the timing for direct mail campaigns? Hitting the right window can make the
Here are the similarities between Company A and Company B:
•    Both sell snow-clearing services to businesses, schools, and other professional organizations.
•    Both use free ice melt as an incentive to grab attention and encourage responses to their marketing messages.
•    Both mailed short-run targeted postcards to facilities directors and operations managers in their local areas.
•    Both used a clean list, with updated names and addresses.
Here is where the campaigns differed:
Company A sent its direct mailer in November. This mailer landed on recipients’ desks in the start of the snowy season. Company B sent its mailer in July. This mailer dropped in the heat of the summer months before most people even think about the first snowflake beginning to fly.
Which company got the timing right? Company B—the one that sent its mailer in the summer. Among facilities and operations managers, decisions regarding snow clearing are made in July and August, well in advance of the cold weather.
To the average person, a direct mailer sporting ice-covered trees and automobiles encapsulated in snow drifts might seem out of place and totally ill-timed in the heat of the summer. But to the target audience, the message was loud and clear: this company knows my business.
How well do you know your target audience?
difference between recipients saying, “That’s me!” and the piece being rejected out of hand. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in this tale of two campaigns. 

 ~ Kelly Mank, President of Time4Printing, Kelly@Time4Printing.com
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