When the economy is bad and budgets are stretched to the breaking point, it’s easy to be short sided about your marketing costs. We have all heard that old cliché, “penny wise, pound foolish”. That saying was written over four hundred years ago by an English author, Edward Topsell, and its sentiment still rings true today. Even with some signs that an economic recovery is underway and ad spending is finally recovering, marketers are still cautious with their budgets. Direct marketing efforts simply must prove their ROI. Not to say that marketers were throwing money out the window a few years ago, but there certainly has been a shift in the way an ad program is evaluated and what results are expected.
Many moons ago I was working on a direct mail program for an international auction company. We had put together a nice package consisting of an oversized envelope, a glossy color catalog, a letter and a buckslip. When the cost estimate came in from the lettershop, management was not happy. It was going to cost roughly twice what they had projected for this campaign. However, based on what our competition was sending out, we knew the package would stand out and certainly drive better results.
Structural Graphics’ core business is our high-impact dimensional print solutions. If you’re reading this you probably are somewhat familiar with our work, and you also may know that we offer a different kind of direct marketing product. We don’t sell postcards for fifteen cents each and we certainly don’t do many standard white envelopes. We don’t offer the least expensive direct marketing products because we are more focused on our client’s ROI. To achieve a greater ROI you need to do something different and that just can’t be done with a postcard or regular envelope. Our clients report significantly higher returns than with traditional mail, and in today’s economic environment that speaks louder than cost savings.
Let me take you back to the auction company’s direct marketing package. Through a tedious process of what can only be described as “marketing whitewashing”, the package we had put together was slowy torn apart. The buckslip disappeared, the letterhead logo was turned to black and white, and the envelope shrank. We sent out a sub-par package and our results reflected that. It was really disappointing, and I was furious with management. In looking back, the blame was actually on our marketing department, not on the management that had torn the original package apart. We had done nothing to demonstrate the importance of the more expensive package and we also didn’t know for sure what a response was really worth. Without those numbers we had no way to make the case for spending more.
Each time we attend direct marketing trade shows and events we inevitably here from a few marketers who repeat the same line, “we love your work but could never afford it”. To that point I like to remind people that if one of our solutions can dramatically increase your response rates what exactly is it that you can’t afford?
