B-to-B Insights : Getting a Leg Up

Five ways to boost B-to-B direct mail response rates

I'm somewhat of an anomaly in the freelance copywriting business. I say this because I am one of a small group of copywriters who write a significant amount of direct mail for two distinct and different markets: consumer mail-order marketers and B-to-B lead generation.

From this perspective, I've learned that the most knowledgeable direct mail practitioners are, by far, the large-volume consumer mail-order marketers. There are two reasons why the Boardrooms and Agoras of the world know so much more than their B-to-B counterparts about what sends response rates through the roof.

First, when you mail millions of pieces a year, you can do a lot more testing. Only through testing do we learn what works—and what doesn't.

Second, the consumer mail-order marketers live and die by the power of their direct mail and online promotions. For their businesses to make money, they must perfect their copy, design, list selection and offers.

By comparison, many B-to-B marketers do direct mail campaigns of only a few thousand pieces—and in narrow niche markets, only a few hundred pieces. With these small quantities, the number of variables you can test is severely limited. And these small-volume B-to-B mailers typically rely on multiple marketing channels, of which direct mail usually is not the most significant.

Also, while lead generation requires a definite skill set and knowledge base, it is somewhat less difficult than one-step promotions. With lead generation, the mailing just gets the prospect to express interest, but the sale is closed by a salesperson. In mail order, your direct mail package has to do the entire selling job.

To help improve your B-to-B direct mail results, here are five important direct mail lessons you can learn from your B-to-C direct marketing brethren.

1. Use a List Broker
A surprising number of B-to-B marketing directors have told me they rent mailing lists directly from trade publications and other list owners, and do not use a list broker. A significant minority was either not aware of the existence of list brokers or did not know what list brokers do or why to use them instead of renting lists directly from owners.

You should always use a list broker. The broker does the list research for you for free because you do not pay unless you rent from it. Even then, the service costs nothing because the list owner, not the list user, pays the broker's commission. It costs the same to rent a list from the broker as it does to rent it directly from the owner.

When you want to mail to a particular industry or market segment, resist the temptation to simply call the leading trade journal in that industry and rent its subscriber list. Instead, call a list broker and ask for mailing list recommendations.

You might feel certain the trade journal subscriber list is the best and only list you should use, but more often than not, this assumption is wrong. List brokers can find lists reaching your market that you didn't know existed and that might outperform the subscriber list you were certain would work best.

2. Test Multiple Lists
Lists that seemingly reach the same group of prospects can vary wildly in response rates. Once, for a B-to-B software publisher, we tested the top two trade journals in its niche market—two publications that, to me, looked and read almost identical. Yet when the mail results came back, one publication's subscriber list generated three times the response of the other—proving that you must test.

For most B-to-B offers, assuming an average response rate of 1 percent, you can get a statistically valid test result mailing to a minimum of 1,500 names in each list. Response devices must be key-coded so you can track results.

3. Understand the Importance of Offers
When I started in B-to-B marketing 30 years ago, the majority of ads and mailers I saw didn't even have offers—just the advertiser's address and phone number. Today, B-to-B marketers know the importance of offers, which is important because I've seen one offer outpull another offer for the same product at as much as tenfold.

The most effective method of increasing the response rate of a lead generation campaign is to use a "bait piece." The term bait piece refers to free information the advertiser offers in its mailing or e-mail to generate a higher number of inquiries. The word bait is used because the free content is given not just to educate the reader (as the reader is led to believe), but to "hook" the reader by generating a response or inquiry, which then can be followed up by telephone or field sales personnel.

4. Emphasize Offer, Not Brand
Many B-to-B marketers focus—perhaps excessively so—on branding and messaging in their communications.

The wisdom of stressing the offer in advertisements has been known for well more than a century. In 1902, three years before he wrote his groundbreaking paper on the theory of relativity, a young Albert Einstein ran newspaper ads offering his services as a tutor in math and physics. The ads prominently offered a "free trial lesson"—showing that free offers really are a smart marketing tactic.

5. Develop a Powerful USP
The idea of the unique selling proposition (USP) was originated by Rosser Reeves in his book "Reality in Advertising."

Reeves wrote that to sell your product, you had to clearly show how your product is different or better than the competition, and how this advantage benefits the buyer. In addition, the advantage and its benefit must be significant, not trivial—strong enough to get prospects to buy your product over others. According to Reeves, the best way to do this was with a strong USP.

I heard a great story the other day about a USP for auto insurance. An insurance agent told parents of teen drivers that, if they bought auto insurance from him, he would give them his home phone number. If the teen ever was too drunk to drive, he could call the agent at home, and the agent would come pick him up and drive him home to ensure his safety. No other agent offered this advantage in his market, so it was the major selling point, or USP, of buying auto insurance from this agent.

Bob Bly is a freelance copywriter and the author of more than 75 books, including "The White Paper Marketing Handbook" (Racom). You can find him on the Web at www.bly.com, e-mail him at rwbly@bly.com or phone (201) 385-1220.

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