A Direct Marketing Agency - Helping Brands Acquire and Retain Customers

So you’ve heard the pros and cons of social media but you’re still not sure how to make social media and the online world work for you instead of against you. Here are a few tips to get started.

Start by using a variety of Web 2.0 tools and practice defensive branding techniques to help control the message your brand sends to the consumer. The top 3 tools today are: 1. Facebook pages 2. Wikipedia 3. Corporate Twitter. These tools will become the face of your brand online. And, like you feared, negative content and brand bashing is bound to happen but you can control it, or better yet prevent it, with defensive branding techniques. Marketing Sherpa has recently published six tips to help you control your brand in an online world.

1. Trust
2. Authenticity
3. Transparency – don’t hide anything (control the message or the critics will)
4. Listening – make is easy to contact the company so consumers complain to you instead of YouTube
5. Responsiveness – speed, truthful, customer service, listen and be prepared for those high-volume times
6. Affirmation – make sure Google/Wikipedia searches are aligned with your values and goals.

The decision to open or not to open…as you skim your ever growing inbox, how do you decide to open, read or trash? Everyone has their own filtering system but two things undoubtedly help your decision – the sender and the subject line. These two filters categorize the e-mails into urgency (need to open) based on reputation of the sender and the relevance provided in the subject line.

Because prospects are just that, prospects, and a running e-mail conversation may not already be established, a lot is riding on the subject line of your e-mail campaign. Lyris recently published a white paper with key tips to writing successful subject lines. Here are a few.

1. Read the newspapers. Like newspaper headlines, your subject line should state what your reader could expect from opening the e-mail.
2. Test, Test, Test. Test to determine trends and styles that work for you.
3. List key info first. 50 characters is not a lot of space, make sure all crucial words (dates/prices) are early in the subject line.
4. Personalize. Personalize subject lines based on users’ product or content preferences, interests, past purchases, Web visits or links clicked.
5. Avoid spam filters. Run your content through a content checker and avoid using all capital letters and too many exclamation points.
6. Review previous subject line performance. Continue using techniques that worked before.

Average businesses waste $180,000 per year on distributing direct mail that is irrelevant to its receiver. The research conducted by Dynamic Markets reveals that for every piece of mail returned, 20 pieces are thrown away and 5% of the mail returned is still considered irrelevant to the recipient.

WHY?: inaccurate data.

SOLUTION: monitor quantity sent and response rates to determine relevancy.

Less than half of all businesses can identify how much mail they sent in a year and even fewer monitor the percent returned. 1,500 pieces of unwanted irrelevant mail is received annually by business persons in the U.S. and 280 pieces are intended for the previous employer. By implementing accurate current data to your direct mail campaigns you can increase your ROI, gain real insight into your communications’ success and retain a reputable brand image.

Targeting the right customer isn’t easy and finding them is even harder, and online! The online world is a unique beast. Marketers have found that online traditional strategies blunder and audience behaviors sway from their expectations. So how do you find your right customer online? A recent article I’ve read identified 7 ways to take advantage of online behavioral targeting to make your online marketing efforts evolve from simply being on the web to being seen and used.

1. Let data identify your customers. Your online and offline target markets in most cases will vary. To gain insights into your online market run a broad reach campaign to test audience behaviors and gain insights.
2. Give your media partners the information and time. Sharing the right information ensures the delivery of more relevant experiences for your customer.
3. Focus on the right customer. Reaching more isn’t better. By targeting only the right audience you continue to reinforce brand status online.
4. Develop messaging for each audience. There are often many audiences each with different purchase triggers. Target your audiences by using relevant messaging.
5. Target based on the sales cycle. Once you’ve identified the right audience take it one step further by targeting them strategically with your products sales cycle.
6. Target with product launch cycle. Align your target strategy with key points in your product lifecycle.
7. Measure on the audience. By targeting only the right audience you avoid the waste of broad-spectrum advertising. Click through rates may decrease as you target the right audience because you have avoided those who fall under the group of ‘clickers’, those who click on every ad.