We recently came upon an article on LinkedIn written by a Financial Services Marketing Consultant regarding the importance of including direct mail in an integrated campaign. There are some great statistics within the article in particular some findings from a study conducted by the research company Millward Brown. Click here to read this article.
The DMA show this past week afforded us the opportunity to speak with hundreds of marketers. Outside of the occasional tag-along with sales, the folks in marketing rarely get to speak directly with our prospects and customers. Every business seems to have their common misconceptions from its customers, but sometimes us folks in marketing need a reminder. I was surprised that there were still some old misconceptions about dimensional mail out there. Here are a couple of common misconceptions we hear.
1. Dimensional mail is too expensive. This is one of those misconceptions that we may never get rid of because on the surface, without any analysis, dimensional mail appears expensive. That’s because it costs more than a postcard or standard white envelope. However, I believe it’s far more expensive to mail a campaign that produces lack-luster results when that money and effort could have been put towards a high-impact dimensional solution that can produce, according to the 2010 DMA Response Rate Report, average response rates of 8.51%. So while your upfront investment is often higher, your return is much higher and should more than justify the cost of the campaign.
That being said, Structural Graphics is always budget-conscious when we’re designing a direct mail piece or campaign. For example, many of our most popular dimensional designs actual ship completely flat, saving significant amounts of money on postage. Furthermore, our paper engineers and production team are highly skilled at planning the printing and production of our work to realize the greatest number of efficiencies. For example, a paper engineer may recommend making a design 1/8” smaller on one side simply to fit more on a single sheet during printing. These small considerations add up to large savings for the overall campaign.
2. Dimensional mail takes too long to produce. This could not be further from the truth. Of course it takes longer than printing a letter out and stuffing a business-sized envelope. Sure, I’ll give you that. However, we have been doing this for over 30 years. Our printing and production process is efficiently streamlined to allow for production of some of our most popular designs in as few as 10 days. Furthermore, we do all of our designing, printing and hand assembly in North America. If your design requires hand assembly we actually own the facilities in Mexico where this is done, and have our own customs agents to insure your project keeps moving. We’re pretty darn good at meeting tight deadlines, because for some reason, time is a luxury few of our clients ever have.
Our booth at the DMA show always seems to attract a wide variety of businesses and marketers. While the misconceptions I mentioned are common in the marketplace, there are those folks who never echo those sentiments when they’re at the booth. Those are our clients. If you would like to hear their opinion, instead of my slightly bias point of view, I would invite you to visit our website. On each of the Client Industry pages you can read testimonials from many of our top clients who continue to work with us.
Every year the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) releases a Response Rate Report. The results come from their research and polling of various marketers across various industries. The 2010 report doesn’t hold too many surprises, but does confirm that direct mail continues to be the silver bullet for b-to-b marketers.
When you look at Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising in the b-to-b space, the average response rates were 5.27%. However, the average cost per click was $4.59. So while the average response rates for PPC campaigns were not that bad, the cost is pretty high.
Email marketing faired a little better. The average open rate is a surprising 19.85%. However, those are just people that opened the email. The average click through rate was 7.26%. This percentage isn’t really a measurement of response, however. An email response is actually when someone not only clicks on the link, but also performs some sort of call to action.
The study found that the average response rate for a letter-sized mailer to a house list was 4.28%. For respondents that used dimensional mail, the average response rate shot up to 8.51%.
It seems that each of three most popular direct marketing methods have their strengths and weaknesses. Direct mail continues to provide consistent, reliable results. That being said, I would argue that the most effective method is in combining all three into an integrated campaign. Bridging digital with high-impact dimensional mail has resulted in incredible ROI for our clients, in both the b-to-b and b-to-c space.
To read more about the study click here.
Direct mailers in the United States are to see for themselves the benefits of linking smartphone technology with the physical mail, under a special promotion from the US Postal Service this summer. Click here to read the full article.
I once read that the majority of people believe that advertising doesn’t work on them. In other words, they don’t fall for the tricks of the trade. However, at the end of the day we’re still mortals who like pretty pictures, beautiful-looking people, flashy headlines and great sounding deals. So, as I was sifting through a stack of mail that my wife refuses to help with, I noticed two interesting pieces. Even though I knew exactly why they caught my attention, and despite the fact I have worked in direct mail for over a decade, I am no more immune to a well-designed piece.
The first direct mail piece was from Yahoo. The outer envelope was oversized and made of a nice glossy cardstock. It looked important. The graphics were bright and well done, so I wanted to open it and find out what they had to offer. I was a bit disappointed. I pulled out the contents and it was a single card, sort of like a buckslip only it was cardstock like the outer envelope. To be honest, I just opened it about 24 hours ago and I can’t remember what the card said or even what the main offer was. I was really surprised because it was clear they spent extra money on large, higher quality components, but didn’t deliver on the promise of the outer envelope.
What could they have done? I immediately thought of our Flat Book-Cube design. Yes, I am a little biased, but the Flat Book-Cube packs a lot of punch and offers a generous amount of copy space. At tradeshows and presentations it’s always fun to watch a person’s expression as they pull a Flat Book-Cube out of an envelope. Let’s just say, it commands attention.
The second piece was from Gerber. Since our daughter was born we have been getting tons of “baby mail”, but this piece was pretty impressive. It was a somewhat thick package and was also personalized. It had a little icon that represented the age category our daughter was in. This level of personalization is great because it lets the recipient know that the piece will be relevant. When I opened the envelope a large sheet of coupons for baby food was folded out. What made the package unique was the nutritional guide that was included. It was a tabbed guide with different sections that dealt with baby nutrition. All of the tabs addressed concerns we were having with what to feed our daughter in her stage of development, so it was really relevant and helpful. Overall, it was a nice package, so what was the problem?
Though it was a great package I think they could have made it even more impactful. The tabbed guide was really helpful but it was also too flimsy. When I ripped the guide out with the intention of hanging it on the fridge, all of the individual tabs separated, so it just became a pile of papers on our already cluttered appliance. I thought of our Reference Guides. They are generally made with a heavier stock and can include any number of tabs that flip or pull out. It’s a sturdy piece that offers tons of copy space and design flexibility. Admittedly, the Reference Guide would have cost more to produce, but it also would have stayed in our kitchen for a long time. What would the value of that been for their brand?
Direct Marketing News ran a great article last week on the effectiveness of combining direct mail with digital solutions to create an integrated campaign. The article uses the TruGreen integrated campaign as a case study, but the message in the article is well known amongst marketers.
“Effective direct marketers understand, support and leverage an integrated approach for customer acquisition,” says Chris Nolan, cofounder and president of direct marketing agency Mercury121. “Direct mail will always be a leading channel for customer acquisition. With marketers now able to layer on the interactive elements which drive prospects to the Web and personalized content, they’re bound to see a boost in response and the conversion of their top prospects.”
A true integrated campaign allows you to combine a few of our favorite things! There’s a high-impact direct mail piece, well designed landing pages to capture response, and of course, QR Codes or Personalized URLs to engage the recipient.
To learn more about our integrated campaigns click here.
Our friend Trish Witkowski is the self proclaimed “Chief Folding Fanatic” at FoldFactory.com; a website dedicated to design and special folds. It is also home to her patented FoldRite design templates. Trish is well known in the direct mail and printing world, due to her impressive design work, but also her popular “Fold of the Week” videos. Each week the Folding Fanatic takes you through an exciting and unique fold. In fact, she was the inspiration for our weekly video series.
Trish wrote a great blog piece recently called “Powerhouse Solutions for Direct Mail”. Besides taking you through five different unique direct mail solutions, Trish also makes great points about the effectiveness of direct mail and the increased response rates that usually justify the increased investment.
You can read the article here, but also be sure to stop by FoldFactory.com and watch some of Trish’s videos.
Within a week of bringing our baby girl home from the hospital my wife and I had established a great nighttime routine. We brought her upstairs for a bath around 9pm, fed her a final bottle, played with her on our bed for 15 minutes or so, and put her down for the night. The routine never changed and after a month she was sleeping through the night. Soon after, the reality of life set in. Not every evening can be the same. Things happen, schedules are changed and our nights became a little less predictable. I can remember the very real fear we had when we strayed too far from the nighttime routine. We thought that by changing a single element of the routine, we would throw our baby off-schedule and would lose our uninterrupted nights of sleep. Eventually, we learned to let go of the fear of what was safe and familiar, we discovered that our daughter was amazingly adaptable and that change actually produced positive results.
In marketing, what is safe and familiar is your control package. You know that using it will produce certain results and perhaps you are satisfied with that. However, your control package may also be blinding you from untapped potential. The three components of a control package are generally, offer, content and format. In most campaigns that I have been involved in we have tested the offer and the content. Very few companies are willing to change formats.
While working for a large magazine, whose audience was primarily senior citizens, my job was to constantly challenge the control package. I can remember our meetings where we discussed different content and offers. If I had recordings of the hundreds of meetings I attended, these would be among the most common statements:
“Maybe we should offer a 15% discount on the renewal instead of 10%, but only if they buy a gift subscription too?”
“Perhaps we should change the background color of the Johnson box?”
“I think we should change the placement of the sticker on the outer envelope.”
These were all legitimate testing variables and we tried many variations of all of them. We even went as far as to change the color or paper stock of the outer envelope, but that was it. We were married to that darn outer envelope. For the two years I was with the company we only tested variations of our offer and content. For whatever reason (I don’t recall the rational,) we thought that senior citizens only wanted to receive plain white envelopes in the mail. With our typical response rate hovering around 1 to 3 percent, this was obviously not true.
Here at Structural Graphics we challenge clients every day to let us beat their control package. They are working with us because they know that the standard outer envelope doesn’t always work. This is not to say that testing your offer and content is insufficient, not at all. These are important variables that need to be taken into consideration and tested. But, my point is, don’t be afraid to change the standard format that is safe and familiar.
I would be remiss if I talked this much about outer envelopes and didn’t tell you about an alternative. Take a look at a special direct mail page we have setup called, “No One Calls This Mail Junk.” I really try hard not to be “sales-ish” in our blog, but after all, it is our blog. I hope you will take a look at the aforementioned page and be motivated to try something new. Perhaps you’ll be inspired to look at your control package a little more critically and realize there is life outside the outer envelope.
Storytelling is nothing new, perhaps as old as humanity. Even printed storytelling dates back around 30,000 years with the existence of the earliest known cave drawings in Europe. When it comes to advertising, you have to be a storyteller. Your advertisement has to appeal to someone in an emotional way, just like a story. And of course, the better your story, the more likely it is that your reader will take action.
Every marketer has a story to tell. Maybe it’s about a breakthrough drug that will alleviate the suffering of many people. Pharmaceutical companies are great at telling stories. They show real people with real problems and present a real solution. Automotive companies tell good stories too. No, I am not talking about the local car dealers that love to put their family members in their television ads; “my dad will get you the car you want at a price you can afford”! In fact, I never really noticed how good the automotive stories were until I had a baby and really started paying attention to the ads. The Toyota Sienna spots (and YouTube videos) are brilliant. They speak directly to someone like my wife who is terrified at the prospect of owning a minivan.
Equally as important as the story is your delivery. Just like your message, the direct mail piece needs to be interesting and engaging. That’s a job for dimensional print.
Tyson Foods wanted an engaging way to tell the story of how their brand has evolved. They used the four selling panels of The Flapper® to do it. They talked about the history of the company, the quality of their foods and finally, on the last panel, introduced a new pizza product. The Flapper was the perfect way to tell the story of Tyson Foods in an interesting and engaging way. Check out the Tyson Foods Flapper, as well as a video on how it works. Tyson Foods had success with this type of storytelling. In fact, they came back to Structural Graphics to tell their story in a new way.
Sometimes a story needs more than just words and graphics to be
told. How about sound? When Victoria’s Secret needed a way to introduce their new cosmetic line “Sexy Little Things”, they knew something standard would not suffice. We produced a beautiful full-color presentation kit that included something unexpected, a whistle when you opened it. This was similar to the package we designed for one of their new fragrances. The package included a light-activated sound chip that whistled when someone opened it.
This is why we, at Structural Graphics, don’t just consider ourselves a direct mail company, or an advertising agency. We are storytellers. We have told a lot of stories in the past 30 years. Does your business have a story to be told?
Though our core business is primarily high-impact print solutions, we are always encouraging our clients to think “integrated” with their campaigns. Effective campaigns require several components to work in harmony to produce the best possible results. The two major areas of focus are the direct mailer and the landing page.
The landing page acts as the lead repository for your campaign. In most cases, your prospects will have their last interaction with your campaign on the landing page, so you need to pay extra special attention to its design and execution. When we are designing a landing page for a client we often gather the designers of the print piece, the creative team, our marketing team and the account manager. That way we can be sure the design is completely in sync with the print piece and the objectives of the campaign.
Here are some tips for designing your landing page for an integrated campaign. These tips include some universal best-practices for web design because many landing pages are used for a long time and hence, should be given the same attention as your corporate website.
1. Cohesive Design: It’s crucial that the look and feel of your 
landing page is similar to that of your print piece. Be sure the colors, fonts and overall design feel are the same. In fact, we have found that a lot of our high-impact designs work well on the web! For example, take our 4-Windown Pull. The unique design allows users to pull tabs and reveal and image or additional copy. For one client we needed to translate this to the web. We created the same four squares using little images. When the user hovered over the images with the mouse they appeared to flip and change into another image. It was very similar to the effect of the print piece.
2. Keep your offer above the fold: Due to various screen resolutions, “above the fold” can vary from user to user. However, a rule of thumb is to offer your best content, headlines, or offer within the top 300 – 500 pixels.
3. Just ask, you may be surprised: Many landing pages concentrate too much on how great the offer is. They offer tons of content repeating the fabulous offer, but they forget to “ask for the sale”. Known to all sales people, “asking for the sale” is a key principal. It seems basic, but sales people are often intimidated or lack confidence in their product/service, so they forget to simply ask for the sale. If you want a user to fill out a form, just ask.
4. Ask, but not for too much: There is still a significant portion of the population that believes it’s unsafe to give out information online, and their fear is not totally unfounded. Recently, Facebook faced huge criticism and a backlash from users for their confusing and lackadaisical privacy policies. Furthermore, sites like Gawker, Network Solutions, Twitter and more have been hacked with customer information stolen. To minimize this fear only ask for the information you need. If you’re asking for them to sign up for something, then you probably don’t need their birth date or household income, do you? Well, maybe you do for classification purposes, but be mindful of what you’re asking. Perhaps you can ask for a range (24-35 years old) instead of specifics. Also, insure that their information is going to be kept securely by displaying an SSL certificate badge and your privacy policy.
5. Design for search engines: For longer lasting campaigns it may be beneficial for the landing page to be indexed by Google and other search engines. This is all part of a larger search engine optimization discussion, but this is the basic must-haves. To be sure your page is as visible as possible, use lots of text, not just images or animations. Also, use <H1, H2, H3> tags for your main headlines. This tells search engines what your page is about (in order of importance.) Lastly, be sure you include the following metadata on your page.
<title>: This is visible to the searcher and is usually the first line you see on the search engine results page (SERP). It should be similar to your <h1> headline tag, thus confirming to the search engine what your page is about. Also, this could include your offer, since it will be visible on the SERPs. For example, you may write “Free Gizmo if your sign up now.” If this is in your title tag it will be visible to the browser when they are deciding what page to click on.
Click here for an extended explanation of metadata and best practices.
Hopefully this helps you to focus on the important parts of creating a landing page for an effective integrated campaign. Though there are many other key factors to consider, following these steps will help insure you present a cohesive and effective offer to the prospect.
