Download `Direct mail gives you the element of surprise over your audience`

B P S U RV E Y
DIRECT MARKET ING
Element Of Surprise
What’s going on in direct marketing, including direct mail?
Emily Styles finds out from some industry players
Ignition was founded by David
O’Sullivan and Jennifer Williams in
2000 as an integrated, direct
marketing, advertising and promotions
agency. The agency styles itself as
‘integrated ideas people’ and was
recently named An Post Smart
Marketing Agency of the Year 2016.
What type of businesses should be
considering DM/direct mail campaigns?
All businesses, whether large or small,
should always consider direct
mail/marketing as part of their strategy,
but more definitely when they integrate it
with other channels, such a digital. DM
and digital have data at their core and a
growing reliance on personalisation,
which can add value to each medium
when they complement, rather than
compete with each other.
Certain products or services do lend
themselves more to an online
environment, but that shouldn’t
necessarily exclude them from using
direct mail as a tactical channel when the
need arises. Certain B2B marketing
situations might call for a ‘surgical strike’
when looking to target a small group of
very senior people. We call them ‘conduit
clients’, or people who we need to convert
from gatekeepers to those who can open
the door to a significant and wider
commercial opportunity for a brand.
With direct mail, what’s more important –
the pitch, the creative, the call to action
or the list?
If executed properly with a compelling
creative idea, a direct mail campaign
should deliver more than the sum of its
parts in terms of its effectiveness. The
various elements all have an impact to
differing degrees, with some, like copy
and design, working more in tandem
with each other, rather than having
separate individual roles.
If you think of how Olympic circles
overlap, it’s similar to how the
components exert a greater or lesser role
in the impact of a DM campaign.
What was it that impressed the Smart
Marketing Awards judges?
We had a fairly large output during 2015,
with a range of eight different creative
campaigns being acknowledged with
awards by the judges. Overall, it comes
down to a desire to engage and enthrall a
target audience through thoughtprovoking creative, where design
reinforces copy effectively and gives the
product or service a sense of context and
relevance in the consumers’ lives.
Data and personalisation remain a
significant part of what we do because we
believe it’s important to acknowledge the
needs or wants of consumers as people,
before you can provide an answer
through the brand you’re promoting.
If I go over the three campaigns that
won for art direction, all were based on
‘Direct mail gives you the element of
surprise over your audience’
David O’Sullivan
tapping into a range of human emotions
and all were digitally printed and
personalised. All were designed with diecuts, or finishes, to help tell a visual story
that made the copy more intriguing,
more tactile and more impactful.
For our ‘Happy Friday 13th’ campaign,
the title itself and front visual of a black
cat with menacing spot-laminated blue
eyes certainly created the reaction we
were looking for. It’s why direct mail is a
fantastic medium to work in, as it gives
you or your brand the element of surprise
over your audience, which adds much
more resonance to a good creative idea.
What attributes are required for DM
professionals?
Understanding the sales objective of
creativity and how ‘the sell’ is expressed
through design, copy, data and the print
and production elements of campaigns
are essential. You have to think like a
consumer even when you’re the wrong
gender, wrong age, and from a different
socio-economic background. There’s a
skill and a discipline in honing a creative
idea into a format that works effectively
on a number of levels.
Survey continued on page 46
44
BUSINESS PLUS
JULY 2 0 1 6
B P S U RV E Y
DIRECT MARKET ING
‘Targeting is the crucial building block of any good direct mail campaign’
DMCM was set up by Peter Whelehan
who holds an honours degree in
Psychology and postgraduate DBS in
Marketing from the Smurfit School of
Business.
What type of businesses should consider
direct mail campaigns?
Any business with a database. The size
of the database doesn’t matter because
bigger databases allow for more and
better segmentation and clustering of
customers within the main database.
That in turn allows for more tailored
and relevant offers to these segments or
clusters. This is where companies are
getting cleverer with the use of the
much-vaunted ‘big data’.
Are certain sectors more suited to DM
than others?
Sectors that communicate regularly
with their customers are probably a bit
more suited to DM, particularly sectors
where some sort of physical
engagement is important. With online
and email scams rife, customers want
to receive communications they can
trust and physical direct mail allows for
this in key industry sectors, such as
banks, insurance companies, utilities
and the like.
Anyone can send an email to any
number of people at little or no cost, so
there’s often a trust issue around email
and online communications that more
traditional DM doesn’t have to worry
about, in B2C and B2B marketing.
What does direct mail bring to the party
that other advertising does not?
Very precise targeting and true brand
engagement. With above-the-line
advertising, no client knows for sure if
their ad is being seen or getting noticed
by their target audience, so there can
often be huge budget wastage.
DM is different in that we know
exactly who is getting the
communication piece. It amazes me
that some brands spend six-figure
budgets on ‘awareness’ or ‘brandbuilding’ advertising yet sometimes find
it hard to set aside a reasonable fivefigure sum for engaging, creative DM
46
BUSINESS PLUS
JULY 2 0 1 6
Peter Whelehan
that will be more tangible and
engaging, and will usually drive a better
response and ROI.
It’s important that above-the-line
brand and awareness advertising in the
auto industry is supplemented with
clever, creative and engaging direct
marketing, which comes in behind it to
create physical engagement and drive
response once the awareness is there.
Often the response can be ringfenced specifically to a DM campaign
by incorporating a landing page, or by
having an offer that only appears in the
DM piece. So when we review a
campaign we know the exact response
and return the DM was responsible for,
as the offer may not have appeared
above the line or in any other channel.
The fact that less direct mail has been
happening in recent years should be seen
as an opportunity. With less DM in
people’s letterboxes now, those DM
pieces that are being sent are having a
greater impact. With online channels, it’s
incredibly difficult for advertisers to
stand out and to get the attention of
those aged 18-24, despite the fact that
they’re online most of the time.
What’s more important - the pitch, the
creative, the incentive or the list?
The targeting (list or database) is by far
the most important factor. Creative
grabs people emotionally and gets them
excited, as does a good offer, but there’s
no point in sending a highly creative
message with a great offer to the wrong
person.
For example, if I get a clever, creative
and engaging DM piece that looks
incredible from a design and
production point of view, and it’s
offering me 60% off landscape
gardening this summer, it won’t have
any impact if I live in an apartment –
it’s just not relevant.
The creative and the offer must also
be relevant to the person being
targeted, so targeting is the crucial
building block of any good direct
campaign. The offer, creative sales pitch
and call to action should all be built
around this in any DM campaign.
Survey continued on page 48
WHO CARES
WINS
If you care about creativity, results and relationships, then we have a lot in common.
For over ten years DMCM has worked with speed, agility and smart creativity to put a smile
on people’s faces and incentivise them to buy. But we care about much more than short-term
sales. We’re here to help clients acquire new customers and build long-term, profitable
relationships with them.
Showing customers you care about them is a recipe for success. And so is using creativity
to build relationships and deliver results. Sticking to this commonsense formula has earned
DMCM a stream of awards over the years. And 2016 has been no exception.
You care about winning. We do too. So let’s get you up to speed and talk about how
we can do it - together.
B P S U RV E Y
DIRECT MARKET ING
‘The number of direct mail
campaigns has increased due to a
more forensic use of data’
Dataconversion Direct is a leading
integrated direct marketing solutions and
software services provider based in
Dublin. Anna Browne works with clients
on their data issues, offering solutions and
insights to focus their direct marketing
strategy and increase customer
acquisition, loyalty and retention.
As the economy recovers, what sectors are
committing more investment to DM and
direct mail?
The past year has been very successful
for Dataconversion Direct (DDL). We
are now two years back in our original
home in Pearse Street and in that time
we have refocused our efforts in datadriven marketing.
We have also acquired a software
development house, which has given us
48
BUSINESS PLUS
JULY 2 0 1 6
Anna Browne
B P S URV E Y
the resources to be able to build
bespoke data solutions for our existing
and prospective clients. We have seen
significant moves from the financial,
automotive and retail sectors back into
direct mail. While the overall volumes
in direct mail have dropped, the
number of campaigns has increased
due to a more forensic use of data.
How important is data analysis?
Data can seem daunting to small and
large firms alike, which is where a
company like DDL comes in. We will
walk you through any data analysis or
integration project, make data easy to
understand and link it to your
management KPIs. We aim to give our
clients a ‘single view’ of their data,
taking various data sources from either
within or external to the business and
combining them for analysis purposes
to drive business insight.
One of DDL’s service offering relates to
email. How difficult is it for email to
perform an effective marketing role?
Email broadcasts are only as good as
the data behind them. Similar to largevolume direct mail, the days of a ‘spray
and pray’ approach are now gone. A
good email campaign needs to be
targeted by the correct product to the
correct person at the correct time,
otherwise you run the risk of largevolume unsubscribing.
Furthermore, we encourage our
customers not to view it as an isolated
communication channel, but rather
one in a range of customer engagement
channels, all of which link back to your
single-view reporting.
To what extent are companies taking
advantage of the new Eircode address
system?
We are a value-added reseller for
Eircode and we’re currently
undertaking the accreditation process.
Initial take-up was slow, as most of our
clients were in ‘wait and see’ mode.
However, now that Eircode has
celebrated its first birthday the number
of enquiries has increased in the last
two months in particular.
Eircode works with DDL’s business
model, allowing customers to view
their customer base with more
granularity, which obviously assists in
targeted communications.
DIRECT MARKETIN G
How To Use Direct Mail
Customers want the right content, at the right time, and in
the right place. They want compelling content that makes
them feel emotions, creates intent, and inspires action
Decide what your objectives are:
for example, making direct sales,
maintaining customer relationships
or generating new enquiries.
Identify your target
audience, typically similar to
your existing customers.
Establish your budget.
Consider how much each
response will be worth to you
and the likely response rate.
Plan the timing of the mailshot.
Avoid holidays and ensure that
mailings that are linked to a
specific event arrive in good time.
Build your own mailing list and
keep it up to date. Keep records
of enquiries and existing
customers and ask existing
contacts for new leads.
Consider renting a mailing list.
Clearly specify your target audience,
how many names you want and
whether you intend to re-use the
list. Make sure you get your lists
from a reputable business. Ensure
that the list has been cleaned to
remove any names that have
opted out of receiving mailings.
Ensure that your use and
storage of personal data complies
with the Data Protection Act.
Prepare a letter with a clear,
attention-grabbing message selling
the benefits of your offer. People
make decisions based on emotion.
Then they justify that decision with
logic. To set up a sale, appeal to
emotion first. To close and
confirm the sale, use logic.
Design the mailshot to be
attractive. Personalise the envelope
and letter as far as possible and
don’t be afraid to get creative. The
credibility that a professional design
DMCM used a
Tarot cards theme for
a direct mail campaign for SEAT
lends to your marketing message
is well worth the investment.
Make responding easy (e.g. with
a pre-printed reply card) and
consider offering an incentive to
reply promptly. Every direct marketing message includes three
basic elements: an offer, enough
information for immediate acceptance of the offer and a mechanism
for responding to the offer.
Use test mailings to establish
likely response rates, and to
compare the effectiveness of
different mailshots or mailing lists.
Success depends on continually
testing and refining all the elements
of a mailing, rather than necessarily
having a flash of creative genius.
Decide how you will handle the
response and make any necessary
preparations. For example, train
employees how to deal with
enquiries and ensure you have
adequate stocks.
Send out the mailing. Consider
using a specialist mailing house
to handle large mailings.
Analyse the response.
Record which contacts have
been mailed and their response.
Survey continued on page 50
BUSIN ESS PL US
JULY 2016
49
B P S U RV E Y
DIRECT MARKET ING
Direct Mail Resurgence
Online advertising’s difficulty is direct mail’s opportunity, as ad-blocking shows
why direct mail still works, writes An Post’s Fiona Heffernan
or several years now, direct mail
marketing has been buffeted by
threats from rival direct marketing
substitutes that make a lot of noise
and promises. Despite this, direct mail
has held its own and in general the
various marketing channels have
learned to co-exist by finding their
places in the food chain.
Indeed, direct mail has evolved to
do the business for brands that, five
years ago, lived solely in the land of
online. While ‘transactional’ mail is
experiencing steady declines globally,
in Ireland ‘marketing’ with mail
volumes are increasing. This has been
fuelled by the direct marketing
ecosystem shifting and changing.
F
Consumer Driven
The improving fortune of direct mail is
being driven by consumers, through
the action of downloading ad-blocking
software to their devices. To put this
into perspective from a mails point of
view, you may see ‘no junk mail’ signs
on letterboxes around the country, but
more than double the amount of
households now use digital adblocking. The threats of the past have
become the opportunities of today.
The resurgence of direct mail can be
attributed to several factors:
Three in four consumers say they
enjoy direct mail as a marketing
channel. While other channels are
being blocked, direct mail is being
enjoyed more. And that holds true for
all ages, including 18- to 25-year-olds.
Consumers pay attention to direct
Fiona Heffernan
mail – 89% of direct mail is read or
skimmed for offers. Compare that to
email advertising, for example, where
over 2.5 times more is deleted without
having been read.
Direct mail is an online driver. As
Ireland’s marketers seek out methods
to counteract diminishing online reach
caused by ad-blocking, direct mail
becomes a viable new route to online
buyers. Thus, the integration of direct
mail into communication plans for
online retailers is a growing trend.
In Ireland, over half of Irish
consumers say they will go online to
find out more on receipt of relevant
direct mail, and that’s just passive
interest. The trick is to use promo
codes and personalise the message.
To get the best return, transfer the
knowledge of what consumers are
doing online into direct mail offers.
Use information garnered from
analytics in direct mail campaigns, i.e.
if users are viewing items online but
not buying, use this information to
mail your registered user and offer on
that specific product.
Fiona Heffernan is Head of
Post Media with An Post
ADMAILER DIY DIRECT MAIL
big success story for An
Post in recent years has
been AdMailer, a self-service
direct mail service that works
through the internet. Though
AdMailer was initially devised with
local businesses in mind, the
programme has been picked up
with enthusiasm by large
companies too.
At the AdMailer website,
A
50
BUSINESS PLUS
JULY 2 0 1 6
businesses can design postcard
or letter campaigns using
templates and select the streets
and areas they want to target
with a mapping tool. A campaign
will be printed and delivered by
An Post within three to four
working days.
An A5 postcard campaign
currently costs 65c per item
and a letter mailing is 90c plus
VAT. The minimum cost of a
campaign is €130 plus VAT, based
on 200 postcards.
According to Fiona Heffernan:
“AdMailer was created as a sales
generation tool for all sizes of
business seeking to reach new
customers. AdMailer is a low-risk
sales tool that can be tested
without the sting of a significant
initial investment.”
Direct Mail
personally
delivered
by An Post
While consumers are busy
blocking some advertising,
they’re also busy enjoying
direct mail.
Recent research from Millward Brown shows that, yet again,
enjoyment levels for direct mail are on the increase.
And, not only is direct mail experiencing consistently high
levels of enjoyment amongst all consumers, it’s also hitting
home with the country’s 18 to 25s.
When planned as part of an integrated campaign, direct
mail can be particularly powerful, bringing you the ability
to target your audience with a truly focused message.
If you’d like to know more about the power of direct mail,
visit [email protected] or call us on 01 705 7494.