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General advertisers believe they are losing control of their brands. They’re wrong. They’ve never had control! Advertising is focused on changing the way people think, while direct marketing changes the way people act.
Here are three ways to get your brand back:
1. Behavioral targeting is easy when your product/service is associated with a particular activity or pursuit. It can still be done, even with more general products and services—but it’s a bigger challenge.
2. If your marketing program is broken, you need to test everything. If your program is healthy, spend about 20 percent of your budget testing. If it’s somewhere in between, spend about half your budget in testing. Align your offer tests with your sales process; some people call this lifecycle marketing.
3. Build your brand customer by customer, through a managed annual mail rotation. An example of a proactive mail routine is to mail the strongest segments of your list four times per year and mail others one time per year. If you adhere to this schedule, your total customers gained will be more than when all customers are treated equally.
Spyro Kourtis is the president and CEO of The Hacker Group, a direct marketing agency based in Bellevue, Wash. He can be reached at (425) 454-8556 and skourtis@hackergroup.com.
(This information appeared in the DMA07 Show Daily during the Direct Marketing Association’s annual conference. It is based on Kourtis’s session, “Using DM to Build Brands, One Customer At a Time.”)
Here are three ways to get your brand back:
1. Behavioral targeting is easy when your product/service is associated with a particular activity or pursuit. It can still be done, even with more general products and services—but it’s a bigger challenge.
2. If your marketing program is broken, you need to test everything. If your program is healthy, spend about 20 percent of your budget testing. If it’s somewhere in between, spend about half your budget in testing. Align your offer tests with your sales process; some people call this lifecycle marketing.
3. Build your brand customer by customer, through a managed annual mail rotation. An example of a proactive mail routine is to mail the strongest segments of your list four times per year and mail others one time per year. If you adhere to this schedule, your total customers gained will be more than when all customers are treated equally.
Spyro Kourtis is the president and CEO of The Hacker Group, a direct marketing agency based in Bellevue, Wash. He can be reached at (425) 454-8556 and skourtis@hackergroup.com.
(This information appeared in the DMA07 Show Daily during the Direct Marketing Association’s annual conference. It is based on Kourtis’s session, “Using DM to Build Brands, One Customer At a Time.”)
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