Sharpen Your Focus to Increase ROI

November 2006 By Daryl Gale

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A shotgun approach may be fine for duck hunting, but not if you’re hunting for prospective customers in a business-to-business environment, according to Terry Jukes, founder and CEO of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based consulting firm, B2B Direct Marketing Intelligence. Instead, Jukes recommends B-to-B marketers take a more focused approach.

“Test more single-minded offers. Time and again, I see B-to-B direct marketers mail ‘the kitchen sink’ and hope that something attracts a new customer. While I agree with communicating the complete range of what you sell, often the message can become confusing, when a 50-page catalog is the offer,” he says. “Think about your audience by list or source and test a specific, single-minded product offer just for them.”

For example, Jukes tells of a recent marketer that was testing a campaign aimed at potential seminar attendees. It turned out that selecting buyers by seminar topic and sending them a targeted offer based on that topic was more productive than selecting names by how recently they’d attended a seminar and mailing the full list of available seminars. By testing a more single-minded offer, the marketer dramatically increased its conversion rate.

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