Getting Big Response From Small Budgets

November 4, 2009 By Ethan Boldt, Editor-in-chief, Inside Direct Mail

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The reality that many direct marketers face today is smaller budgets for their direct mail campaigns. Yet clients don't want to see response rates suffer—and in some cases, they are desperate to see response increase.

In the Oct. 27th webinar Small Budget but BIG Response, presented by Inside Direct Mail, two premier direct marketers, Gary Hennerberg, president of the Hennerberg Group, and Grant Johnson, CEO of Johnson Direct, weighed in with their expertise. Both specialize in direct mail campaigns and are accustomed to seeing modest budgets succeed.

Here are a few tips about how to do just that:

Develop Marketing and Testing Plans

• Set marketing objectives to measure against.
• Identify key messages based upon segmentation.
• Test offers with messaging, but test offers and messaging separately, where possible.
• Make budgetary decisions, and test all you can.

Understand Your Customers

• Analyze your database.
• Understand the impact of the Pareto Principle (80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your customers); for example, one marketer found that 69 percent of its mail volume delivered 94 percent of its sales with smart ZIP code targeting.
• Contact the top customer deciles.
• Use a very special offer.
• You can use an inexpensive package to customers.

Dig In to the Mailing Lists

• Spend twice as much time on list research and testing than you do on creative.
• Run "what if?" scenarios.
• Look for "unharvested" prospects, i.e., those people who tend to get overlooked in traditional market research scenarios.

Play the Elimination Game

• Eliminate a component.
• Eliminate a color.
• Talk to production about reconfiguring a package.
• Do you need all the personalization?

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