Strategy #5) Tracking and Reporting for Success
Every sale in your company should be recorded where the sale came from. EVERY SALE!! If you miss this trick you will throw 3/4 of your annual direct mail marketing dollars in the trash.
I know it feels like you drive your own fate and 'shoot from the hip' with your 'gut instincts' but don't be so vain that you don't track the number of sales and value of each from every thing you sell.
This applies to direct mail as well. Every redeemed piece should be recorded in your CRM tools. CRM tools you say? If you don't know what they are or don't have them in place you and your job are at serious risk. It's the year 2010 - get serious.
The strongest businesses around got there by using math, reports and tracking sales. So how are you going to come anywhere near them if you don't know where your wisest marketing dollar was last year.
Here are some things you should be tracking.
What brought the customer in? Did they see your sign or did a friend tell the to check you out? Did they see your ad n the paper or were they just at the store next door and liked your window display. Whatever it is you want to focus some effort there.
How much did they spend? If the people than randomly walk by your store spend an average of $20 per visit, but the people that drive to your store directly spend $100; you'll want to spend more time on your direct mail and print ads since they earn you more money.
Who are your multi-trip customers? If you have customers that return to your business time and time again would you know who they were? Identify loyalty and reward it! Then give them an offer for them to bring a friend. Birds of a feather do what?
Who are your top spenders? If they like your products why do you wait for them to randomly come in? Personally invite them for something they would like. It's really simple if you take action.
Your best Direct Mail Marketing strategies start with you understanding your clients and learning how to market to each type of client. If you are not tracking anything how will you ever do that?
Step up; it's not a game you want to lose.
I'm sitting down with a client the other day and we are discussing the direct mail giveaway offer and the size of the mailing list. One of the people at the table says, "We'll if we're mailing 10,000 people we need to reduce the size of the offer, we cannot afford to give that much away". This is a typical answer from a newbie.
Strategy #4) Don't be stingy with your offer
The entire idea is to make sure you offer everything you can to each individual where you maximize profit and results. This is what personalization is all about. If one guest is worth offering $20 to get them in and another person is worth offering $100 to, you can do that easily with variable data printing. If you only offer $20 to both people you usually eliminate the response from the $100 guest and your company is full of $20 guests.
As far as "Everyone showing up" You have to ask yourself how many people are really even paying attention to your offers. Direct mail is a numbers game and the more you water down your offers the fewer the number of people that really even care.
Let's say for example I was giving away a free car and I mailed 1000 people to give them away. I would only likely have to give away 50-60% of those at most. First off there are a huge percentage of people in your database that don't read direct mail at all. The there would be skeptics, then people that forget to respond, etc. So you might get a 50-60% response with a free new car.
So when you take your $50 offer and decide to lower it to $15 you are likely taking your 3% and cutting it down to 1% or less. You are also drawing in a much cheaper crowd. If $15 is important to someone they are not likely wealthy enough to be a good customer buying all your goods and services, are they?
Make sure you use your customer historical sales to manage to offer everybody the most you can, based on what they average to spend. Then you get sales from all levels of your customers and not just the cheaper ones. Don't guide your business smaller and smaller by catering to your cheapest of customers by getting cheap on your offers.
But then again don't offer the best you have to your cheapest customers either. I hope you are tracking your customer sales and building offers based on their value. I truly hope you are!
In Direct Mail Marketing we usually have a product we want to sell and we try to find the best way to sell it. We then work every trick and angle we can think of to develop the best response possible. Have you ever thought that maybe this is backwards?
Strategy #3) Sell what your database tells you to! 
Do not tailor your database to your offers, tailor your offers to your database. You need to send things your customers want, not just what you want to sell.
This is where direct mail tracking pays huge dividends. On every mailing and every promotion you ever do you need to find ways to track and record sales and all sales details on each person. This is the only way to develop what each individual likes about your products or services. Information is King!
An example is trying to sell coats to people that buy shoes. Sure you can likely sell some of them coats but for best results sell them more shoes. Then, if they like black shoes; quit trying to sell them blue ones. If they don't like laces, promote shoes without laces to this particular person.
Variable data printing makes this easy!
Why are you pushing coats on your shoe people, anyway?
Sure, maybe you have an inventory of coats to sell too. But you should make those a secondary offer that follows directly behind what you know your customers like first. "Buy 2 pairs of [insert favorite shoes here] and be entered to win this fabulous coat." Then when they are buying all these shoes, you get them to try coats on and tell them about the coat sale this weekend too.
If you do not have the data to know what your customers have bought and how to personalize with variable data printing, you are at the right place here at CSG Direct, Inc.
There is a huge separation in businesses that track sales and those that do not.
If you do not track your customers preferences you are going to lose in your competitive marketplace. You will lose! Your competitors will win more sales with less money. You will win fewer sales and spend much more marketing dollars to do it.
I don't care how clever you think you are there is no intelligent way to send 1 broad message to appeal to everyone in your database marketing equally.
Sure, people have been broadcasting single messages through all forms of media since the beginning of time but that doesn't make it right. If you're going to be lazy you will get lazy results.
Strategy #2) Segment Your Mailing List into groups
You would be surprised how you change your offers and promotions just based on what you see in your database. I highly recommend that every marketing manager look into your database personally so you know what you're working with. As you are digging through your database ask yourself these questions:
- How many are female?
- How many are male?
- What are the age groups in our data?
- How many of these are "locals"?
- How many are from out of town?
- Which groups spend the most?
- Which groups visit us the most?
- What are the 5 most popular purchases?
- What are the 5 most profitable purchases?
- Who is making these purchases?
This should be the consideration you make before you do any form of direct marketing. Why? Because you can do this with direct mail and you cannot do with the rest of your marketing budget. Because it will get you better results!
Once you have your database segmented into 3-5 different groups you need to create offers that directly appeal to each group. Spend time talking to people in those groups about what they really want and what would get them to buy again. Then plan your marketing to that group accordingly. Do this with each group you plan to market too.
I know this sounds obvious, pretty logical and a no-brainer but I cannot tell you how many people just swing from the hip. When you are busy and short handed it is easy to just blast something generic out and hope for the best. In this case it would be best to just identify 1 group and design your campaign around that group directly instead of sending the same offer to 5 groups.
If you do not have enough data in your database to break it into segments we can append data from other consumer databases to yours for you. This dynamically changes what you know about your customers and helps you target your direct marketing correctly.
When you have been in direct mail for 20 years you get to see a lot of direct marketing success and failure. Both are valuable lessons! Avoiding the common mistakes is often still considered a great success. Unfortunately that is the ceiling for most people.
When the most you get out of your campaign is "no-failure" then you really aren't going to see the great success direct mail is known for. So, if I am going to share the best 5 direct mail marketing tips I must start out with the most important one.
Strategy #1) Use a Direct Mail Marketing Company.
Use a direct mail marketing company not just the cheapest printing bid you can find. You can find some real great deep values in real direct marketing companies! In the history of getting what you pay for; the cheapest direct mail project is usually the least effective too.
If you have a $2000 budget don't spend your time trying to get it cut to $1700, spend your time trying to get $3000 in value from it. You can do that with direct marketers, not from printers.
You must keep in mind that Direct Mail Marketing is the only form of marketing that has proven to create perpetual income. Companies for decades have turned $3000 into $5000 or $50,000 or more in sales and income. Are you choosing vendors that know how to help you get to those results or just price shopping print?
You may or may not have experienced these kinds of results.
Many of our customers achieve this every single month.
I know what you're thinking. This all sounds so very self-serving and maybe we're just trying to justify you spending more. This is far from the truth. I can easily demonstrate for you that 90% of the vendors you can get bids from are not worth spending a dime with. I've got 5 tips to show this to you with but the next tips will likely have much more math in them. Let's start with the obvious.
Direct Mail Companies are primarily a labor force with labor as their #1 expense. As you get your 3 bids what you are primarily getting bids on is labor and equipment usage. Our Rent, Electricity, labor and equipment leases are our industries costs. When you get a lower bid you are almost always first and foremost using the least experienced labor to get that price.
For example, here at CSG Direct we have 25 individual 
employees that have been certified by the US Postal Service for mail-piece quality and mailing standards. This means that your service representative, our graphic artists, our quality control department and even our folder, inkjet and press operators are all US Postal Certified employees.
What is the cost and benefits of that? MANY!
First off the most expensive part of direct mail is mistakes. When we have staff in every single department experienced and trained to help you avoid those mistakes - they don't happen!
So how is the lowest bid company managing all that for you? Sure they might reprint it for you free if they make a mistake but that ruins timelines, wastes huge sums of postage money and makes you look bad in front of your boss for choosing them.
Pit our experienced, trained and certified employees versus the industry average of temp labor and basement-kept half-capable $8.50 employees. We Win! ..and You Win!
Plus our staff has decades of
database marketing experience,
seeing direct mail successes and failures. We will be showing you how
to tier mailings, test offers, personalize your mailings and more.
All most printers can do is reduce their bid, they cannot add value or increase your responses. Which is really why you're doing direct mail in the first place ~ to get sales and response.
Keep your head in the game - it's not broadcast-print, IT'S DIRECT MARKETING !
Let's talk about the value of experience with Direct Marketing. The Direct Mail and printing industries are broken up into many niches. You have tabloids, newspapers, invoices, fulfillment, brochure printing, foil or die cutting and of course marketing to name a few.
What is your vendors' primary service? Ours is direct mail marketing but so often we are forced to bid against a brochure printing house or cheapashellpostcards.net. These vendors have absolutely no concern or experience in direct mail marketing and you want to give them the job because, as their only tool to get the job; they low bid the project.
You will not become the hero of your firm by showing them how you saved $200 but the phone isn't ringing. Too often this is why people say, "We tried direct mail, but it didn't seem to work". If you can get a direct mail marketing company for a price anywhere near that of a mostly print oriented company - jump on it !!
So, the first rule of thumb and our #1 tip is to make sure you are using a direct mail marketing company. The good ones are actually a lot harder to find than you might think. You found some pros right here at CSG Direct so get a direct mail quote and get to know us. If you get the chance to sit down with us the difference will be crystal clear.
Remember! You're Marketing Right?
Variable data printing can be one of the most powerful mediums of our time. However, most people who sell this to their clients are not even really doing variable printing. Eighty percent of all variable print is nothing more than mail-merge and fancy fonts. If I get another direct mail offer with my name spelled in sea shells on a beach I am just going to go insane!
"OK, Great, you have a sea shell font - wow - thanks!". What if I'm scared of the ocean? What if I am allergic to seafood of any kind? Are you selling me something to do with a beach or shells?
[First Name] mail-merge is kindergarten at best. The tiny increase in response (if any) will rarely justify the extra expense for this kind of fluff. Plus, you have to worry so much about all the negative associations with an unusual, unrelated approach to selling your goods and services. What's worse, I have seen entire campaigns switch themes away from a companies core brand just to include these fonts. If you are a medical supply company you shouldn't sell yourself with a beach theme just because it looks cool to you. Remember, it should be relative.
Unfortunately the real professionals of variable printing, the database teams in direct mail, have been inundated with printers that are being convinced to buy hundred thousand dollar specialty packages like seashell fonts and PURLs. So, in many ways, this is now the industry standard. To the real database marketing professionals this is very disheartening. However, use this to your advantage! We'll show you personalization that makes sense, creates additional results and is truly tied around the desires of your customers and prospects.
If you don't really know that much about your customers we can append over 100 fields of additional consumer data about them so you know if they like dogs or cats, drive Ford or Chevy, etc. When this is done by real variable data teams in direct mail it will still cost less than all those printers because we do it every day without the baggage of all that crazy software they bought.
At CSG Direct, we have over two decades experience in real variable data: variable data printing, variable data coding, randomization, variable data email, websites, and more. Our entire site is an example of variable data, but you wouldn't know that unless I told you. The images, alts, metas, content, embeds, etc. are all database driven variable content management. All of these tools are built right here at CSG Direct!
CSG Direct lives and breathes variable data so you get better results with REAL personalization!
The mailing industry is going through major changes and I have heard several industry predictions that many mailing services companys and mail processing printers will "get out" instead of keeping up. This isn't a bad thing.
It's an industry reborn!
So as you look for your partner for the next decade I want to tell you what you need to know about mailing services companys.
"They all specialize in something"
Due to the large amount of mail and data processing needs in our country, you'll find that almost every mailshop is eventually pulled into some large account they cater to first and foremost. I have seen it time and time again.
They get pulled into tabloids, invoices, publications, credit card mailings, real estate franchises, etc. You go into any mailshop and see for yourself. What is the primary industry they serve? That is the industry that they are best ready to serve and most prepared to consult in.
These days you will often find out that their primary industry isn't even direct mail. The printing industry started adopting direct mail as a side business to increase revenue about 2-3 years ago.
How would you feel if you found out your "mailing vendor" doesn't even specialize in direct mail at all? It sure would explain some things that have happened along the way with your mailings, I'll bet.
We're a mailing services company through and through. Sure, we have also grown one of the largest digital print shops in the state of Nevada and we keep every traditional press within reach dancing on our projects. But we are a mailshop and we take that very personally. We make a huge difference with the customers that choose us over the status quo. Ask!
It is a big difference and it is what you are looking for. You will never find deep success with people whose core focus is printing. Printing is a secondary skill in our minds. This is database marketing. We're database marketers with a reputation in variable data printing going back to the 80s.
That is just one of the reasons to keep us in mind on your next project. Because we are close, experts in gaming direct mail and have the tools you need.
Well, the word is definitely spreading about the unique direct mail innovations coming out of Reno, Nevada. Ironically, the US Postal Service is worried about record profit losses just when the final direct mail dream is realized with US Mail Tracking.
Our innovations on the cover of Casino City Vendors Guide:
We have really started making an impact on reducing the postage expenses of all our Casino Marketing customers.
No matter where your direct mail is processed you have to correctly time your direct mail delivery. For the rest of the country this is still just guessing and estimation, at CSG Direct we're hitting bullseyes.
We're about to roll out three new tools to add to these innovations. I'll tell you about them as we get closer to release.
Wouldn't it be nice if your vendor knew your lingo, knew your challenges and also knew ways to increase your response or tweak a promotion? If you were to choose between two mailshops you would lean toward the one who could do that more, wouldn't you?
Several of us have worked in casinos - primarily in the database marketing and players club positions. We also have a large team of ex-marketing directors out in the field promoting our services in their consulting packages. Birds of a feather, we are.
We believe anyone who takes their career seriously will find a way to get certified in their field.
CSG Direct has one of the largest USPS certified staffs in the country [link], let alone the gaming industry.
Our 23 Mailpiece Quality Control certified employees work on every aspect of your job. They are your service reps, they run the folders, they run the presses, they work in our quality control department. We have MQC certified employees in every aspect of your job's processing. That is why we have the highest accuracy record of any mailshop we know.
Spend one day observing your local mail receiving dock at any post office and you will see jobs coming off of mailshop trucks and then going back on. That's the dirty little secret of the average mailing. Many times it is delayed because it was rejected by the post office.
You would cringe to know how they "fix" the project after that. You deserve highly trained people in every aspect of your mailing, not temps, not seasonal help! You deserve career professionals certified by the USPS itself. That is what you get from CSG Direct, Inc.
The first time I opened a piece of my own marketing campaign mail more than twenty years
ago, I was astonished to find the letter inside was glued to the inside flap and
as a result came out in tatters from the envelope. After I tried and failed to
open the letter without tearing the piece into bitty sections, I just went at it
until the thing was lying across my desk like a crossword puzzle.
Thing is, the coupons attached were in sections too. I was horrified because the procedures
for accepting the coupons was to have the customer hand the entire letter with
coupons attached to the Player’s Club to be able to acquire their $5 in coin and
$5 in food credit. It said it right on the coupon.
I glanced down at the scattered micro-perforated mess and immediately hurried to the Player’s Club to
make sure the representatives took the coupons no matter how they came into the
counter. Oh my! The line of guests extended for a hundred feet and every one
of them had some kind of abnormal untidy heap of baffling print tangled rag in
their palms.
They all looked confused, but more importantly angry. Instead of
throwing my hands up, quitting my job and running to the nearest pub, I decided
to call in every slot attendant I could get my hands on and give them directions
on making our customers feel at ease. Each one of our guests were told we would
honor every coupon and I ran upstairs and created a sign to post at the casino
entrance and the player’s club that we would handle their bewilderment without
argument.
The next two weeks went fairly smoothly and we actually had comments
that the staff had done a fantastic job in the presence of catastrophe. The GM
gave me a pat on the back and then told me to fire the mailing house, but I had
already communicated my frustration to the company and they gave me a credit on
the next mailing. Apparently, the auto-letter stuffer had just been cleaned and
the equipment malfunctioned that added the minute amount of moisture needed to
seal the flap. Instead, the amount ended up being about a tablespoon and was
not caught by handlers at the end of the line who were wearing gloves to protect
their hands from paper cuts.
More than ten thousand letters were ruined, but a
lesson was learned. Always be prepared for anything happening and think through
the confusion to the solution that ultimately makes the customer happy.
John Evanoff
jevanoff@redearthcasino.com