Direct mail is dead? I keep hearing this, but I also look at stats from various campaigns and see that a combination of direct mail and email seems to get the best results. In fact with the overall drop in direct mail and the exponential increase in email we could argue that cut through and conversion of well thought out highly personalised direct mail could result in improved conversions in the coming year.
However, as the economic outlook continues to be uncertain for the UK I fear a number of companies will cut back their direct mail in favour of cheaper alternatives such as email and add to their overall woes.
It all comes back to multiple channel marketing. You need a good mix, and swapping your DM for email isn’t likely to cut it.
We’ve met with some very bright companies through 2009 that have cracked the personalisation of direct mail and created turnkey digital print and centralised distribution vehicles, and we’re gobsmacked that so few of the bigger direct marketing brands haven’t taken advantage of them.
Our worry is that generic poorly executed email marketing is going to really struggle to get cut through in 2010, and that it will become over used by both those who understand direct marketing techniques and even worse those that don’t.
In our client base we now only work with clients that supply opt-in lists from their own site subscribers, and even with well though out and relevant content the click through rates are rarely better than 15% with opens rates being in the low 30’s as an average. Deliverability is good, we use a well respected carrier for our delivery, but over the past 12 months we’ve seen a slight decline in opens rates and an uplift in unsubscribes.
Our approach to email marketing for clients has been to work hard on the creative to create standout work that has a clear call to action, either through to an incentivised landing page for e-commerce, often using a coupon to allow for overall tracking not just relying on the email or GA stats. Its the joined up approach that really makes the difference. If someone clicks through you then need to get them to do something, whether the goal is brand awareness, lead generation or an online sale.
In a lot of cases we are now developing not just online creative, but offline as well, utilising advanced digital print solutions for personalisation and pushing the mailer out 3-4 days prior to the email marketing campaigns starting. Make sure you use different coupon codes for the offline and online creative, or for lead gen different landing page urls, (keep ‘em simple) and hone your analytics with a campaign filter to cut out all of the other noise. We also like to keep it simple and try to inject some personality into the campaign creative. Seems to be working well at the moment by providing differentiation.
At the end of the day, its all going to come back to commonsense. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Cut down on the print and postage to non-buying customers and poor prospects and use the money saved to test tracked email marketing creative to see if your customer base responds in the right way. If it doesn’t after several properly executed well timed campaigns you’ll need a real rethink.
The guys at 37 Signals in their new publication ‘rework’ have a great chapter about promotion, if you are working with a small advertising budget you should try their approach of building a following rather than throwing money at marketing tactics you can’t measure.
Oh and if you can’t measure it don’t do it.
Posted by rogerm on Mar 21, 2010 in
Analytics,
Digital Marketing Looks like the privacy argument at Google just runs and runs as the company becomes bigger and bigger.
They are going to release browser plug-ins for users to opt-out of being recorded in analytics in the next few weeks.
We will wait to see details of this, but its likely that it will only apply to specific data such as ISP network location and the like, so for the main user base (SME’s) it shouldn’t be overly problematic.
Could be something and nothing?
Posted by rogerm on Nov 18, 2009 in
Email Marketing,
STAR Digital News There is a newly passed amendment to the UK Companies Act means that any UK company has now, by law, to include the following information in their email footers (this means general email not e-mail marketing although best practice would suggest inclusion):
Your company name
Your registration number and registered address (if registered)*
Your place of registration (e.g. England and Wales)
*it is not sufficient to just include a vaild address, it must be your registered address.
Posted by rogerm on Oct 26, 2009 in
Digital Marketing,
SEO This is an interesting development listed on the Google blog.
Could it be that Google are going to show Twitter posts in natural search lisitngs? If so it could make for a new battleground amongst search marketers… Check it out on the Google Blog
Posted by rogerm on Oct 15, 2009 in
Digital Marketing It’s interesting how a ‘credit crunch’ or ‘recession’ in the economy affects the way companies do business.
One frustrating symptom was the increased amount of cold calling that went on during Q2 and 3 as sales managers tried to achieve targets. What a pain, and how frustrating for the poor people who had to perform it.
Then there was the DIY Digital marketing wave…
A huge increase in badly put together, poorly executed email campaigns. the SaaS Email providers made some money, but the upshot is that a lot of companies became quickly dissillusioned with the concept and struck it off the list of marketing tactics.
And of course, the saviour of the credit crunch, Google Adwords.
Free money off vouchers have been flying around in virtually every publication that hits the doormat in a typical SME buisness in the UK. Business owners flocked to redeem their vouchers and let Google manage their online advertising. Oops, that was expensive, didn’t do much for me, better switch it off.
Again, badly executed. The only winner being Google.
Oh, and don’t forget the latest darling, social marketing, Twitter, Facebook and all that. Hmm, hard work to keep that up to date, so it soon falls away.
The result? Digital marketing has quickly found itself becoming as maligned as other marketing tactics by SME’s.
‘Marketing, that’s just a bloody expensive waste of money’
‘Analytics? Are you mad? I haven’t got time for that, theres a bloody recession on, we need to sell, discount, give it away!’
Corporates haven’t fared much better. Often finding that in-house departments don’t have the necessary expertise to plan good digital marketing campaigns. Even if they do they are often hindered by the IT crowd who always built the web site in the first place. So it becomes a protracted effort making any transformation in that direction. Costly, fraught with challenge and pain as the various silo’s within the business fight their corner believing that the strongest will win. What a waste of time, stuff digital marketing. It’s too difficult!
So what is the solution?
Well the majority of sensible digital marketing agencies, of which we believe we are one, are looking at overall marketing strategy or lack of it. What we’ve realised is that a lot of companies need to tear up their entire strategy, let alone their marketing plans. So now we are into a need to define and measure business transformation.
Business Transformation is something that matters in an economic cycle such as the one we are in now. Without planning, and a marketing calendar breaking out tactics, and budget, it becomes difficult to take advantage of any upturn efficiently.
Plus it evolves and changes with the changing climate. That’s where a forward thinking agency can add real value.
Agencies know that the beauty of digital marketing is that when set up and executed properly its completely measurable. So if tactics aren’t working you can tweak, change or discontinue quickly.
Digital marketing has matured during the recession with online advertising overtaking offline spend in areas such as TV, Radio and Press. Search marketing is a huge buisness, and an important discipline for any brand looking to generate increased sales or lead generation.
Local search is maturing as well, and SME’s need to leverage their local, geographic keywords to get in front of their target audience.
Buisness transformation - helped by digital marketing. What are you waiting for?
As an agency we receive a lot of speculative B2B email but the one below takes the biscuit.
The warning. Always check your data lists before sending as you can do yourself a lot of harm. As these guys have done. We won’t be recommending them to any of our clients!
How to annoy your prospects with incorrect targeting. They actually sent this out to agencies!
Posted by rogerm on Sep 11, 2009 in
Digital Marketing,
Web Design Interesting to see that Google have modified their search form enlarging the box and the font to about 130% of the original size.
At first glance it looks a bit odd if you are a regular user, and you instincively check to see if your browser has inadvertantly been set to a higher percentage view as everything below it remains as it was.
However, I guess it will be a usability and accessibility plus and help to reduce the number of typos, or will it?
http://www.google.com
Posted by rogerm on Jul 8, 2009 in
STAR Digital News Five pupils from Year 6 at Woodland View School in Northampton helped STAR Digital to design flyers to promote the Grange Park Business Club. They had all entered a competition to promote the business club and had been selected by the steering committee to attend a design session at STAR Digital’s Castle Ashby studios.
They worked with Andrew Matthews, one of our designers to work up the designs which will be presented to the school and the Business Club as brand boards.
Everyone had fun watching Andrew working in Photoshop and Illustrator, and the children didn’t leave too many crumbs after Andrea gave them all cakes from the Buttery!
Pupils from Year 6 at Woodland View with their design.
Posted by rogerm on Jun 16, 2009 in
Digital Marketing,
SEO Now this couldn’t be easier.
Use the pingback URL to make sure your sitemap.xml file is added to their directory.
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=[your_sitemap_url_here]
If successful you’ll get the following message in your browser window
Thanks for submitting your sitemap.
There you go, nice and easy!
Posted by airtimeandy on Jun 11, 2009 in
General Gripes,
SEO,
Web Design We had a prospect enquire about our small business web design service today, and as we were exchanging emails concerning his requirements he mentioned that a lot of companies had told him they would get him to show on the first page of Google as part of the package.
This kind of thing makes us cross, as we work hard to build everything to be as compliant as is practically possible and we use best practice SEO techniques during the build process. We know that for a new build to get indexed can take months, even with a sitemap.xml file and a robots.txt file in place.
These companies that make promises such as this need to be more transparent about what it is they are actually offering.
To be number one in say the search term plumbers is going to be impossible without a huge amount of post launch SEO trickery such as paid linking.
Some of these companies will look at phrases in the long tail and then optimise for that. They then tell you to search for something like specialist plumber in your town, and hey presto they you are. So you feel good about being at the top of Google. But hang on, where’s all the traffic, all the leads, the phone isn’t off the hook? Exactly! You are at the top of a mountain no one climbs, a desert for searchers.
To be featuring in relevant search you need to optimise for it. So if you are a Plumber in London you’ve got a dilemma. You could try and register a domain name like www.london-plumbers.co.uk but I doubt it will be available. maybe you could get something like SW6-plumbers.co.uk. Now a site on that domain could be optimised for searchers looking for plumbers in that postcode and you could show near the top of search. But in all honesty you’d probably find yell.com more cost effective.
Some other companies tell you that they will get you up there using Adwords and that it won’t cost you more than a small amount, say £50 a month. Again they will deliver on the promise, but usually in minor keywords, or they’ll get you showing on popular keywords for the first few days, and as soon as you stop looking they’ll discontinue your ads. When you contact them they tell you that your monthly spending cap had been reached and that you’ll start showing again next month!
Don’t be fooled by these guys, search engine marketing in popular keyphrases is very difficult. The top brands spend thousands trying to stay at the top.
Also don’t use search engine submission software as this could get you blackilisted by Google. Make sure you submit your sites to searche ngines, directories and reciprocal link directories yourself.
The best advice is to create a web site that works for your business and to promote it using local search with Adwords whilst you optimise on loaclised natural (free) search terms. Registering your site with the free index web sites is always a good idea as well and the list below is considered to be highly effective. Lastly attend networking meetings and hand out cards and flyers to promote the web site.
Just don’t whatever you do be fooled into thinking you can rank #1 on Google for a popular search term from a standing start.
Useful Directories to post your website to for free
www.lii.org
www.jayde.com
www.webworldindex.com
www.illumirate.com
www.turnpike.net
www.bizdirects.com
www.freeindex.com
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