Back to Basics: Three Tips to Make Direct Marketing Work for Your Brand

So you think direct mail is dead, huh? Think again! 

Direct Marketing Association found that the response rate for direct mail to an existing customer averages 3.4%. 

Epsilon found that 50% of U.S. consumers prefer direct mail to email. 

And Target Marketing found that direct mail has the highest rate of success in new customer acquisition at 34%. 

An effective direct mail piece walks your brand, your products and your services into your prospects' homes and you become the topic of conversation around the dinner table. Professional, personalized and compelling direct marketing packages coupled with targeted consumer data will open the door for you; the quality of your products and services will close that door on your way out of a successful sale.

























Check out these three tips to having a successful direct marketing campaign: 

Use a list that best fits your needs. Use multiple data files to identify your prospects by age, income, zip code criteria and other important selects. What about your markets should you consider? What lifestyle choices of your prospects will make a difference when narrowing your target? Work with a list database expert to ensure you have the right list. 

Create a professional, personalized and compelling mail piece. This isn't the time to mail our your company brochure. Your direct mail piece should have a strong offer and a strong call to action as well. Your brand's brochure allows it the opportunity to inform, but its direct mail pieces should ask for specific action. Give your prospects multiple ways to respond to increase your chances of that action. A marketing services expert can provide you with copy and design services to ensure your message invokes the response you seek. 

Manage your responses. While you can't anticipate the exact number of responses you will receive, you can plan ahead so you can manage those responses swiftly and effectively. This will depend on the action you identify in your messaging. Are you asking prospects to email you for more information? If so, have that information ready to send and/or discuss. Are you asking prospects to call in and discuss a particular product or service? If so, train the team who will field those calls on what types of questions to expect and how to answer them. Are you asking prospects to visit a landing page and download something? If so, make sure the messaging of that deliverable matches the direct mail piece and that the link is functional and accessible. 

What other tips should you consider when launching a direct mail campaign? Tell us in the comments! 

By: Susan Gail Taylor, Social Media Manager and Copywriter at RME360

3 Digital Marketing Tools for Your Brand's 2015 Toolkit

If you’re an effective marketer, I bet you’ve been thinking about your upcoming digital marketing plan for 2015. And with thoughts of new strategies and trends naturally comes thoughts of tools. What are the latest tools? Which do my competitors have in their toolkits? What changes do I need to make in how I use my tools?

Be it for blogging, content curation, email automation or social media management, the list of available tools can seem infinite and so can the desire to upgrade your current tools of choice. It’s easy to fall under the spell of all things trendy, but what is your foremost concern: using what’s trendy or using what helps you market most effectively?  

Check out these 3 simple ideas for your digital marketing toolkit and consider how they may be able to help you market better:

1.      Unbounce

Marketing itself as a “code-free zone,” this digital marketing tool allows even the most novice marketers to create well-designed landing pages without the help of designers or IT. Unbounce is a simple tool that provides you with drag and drop options among other design options so you can create, publish and test your landing pages. 

Savvy marketers know that higher conversion rates come from landing pages, not company websites. 96% of your website visitors are not ready to make a purchase. Messaging that is more targeted and relevant to the visitor--messaging that you see on landing pages--drives the higher conversion rates. The more landing pages you have, the more opportunities you'll have to generate leads and fill your sales funnel.

 2.      Vsnap

“Vsnap makes customers smile.” This line on Vsnap’s homepage is an honest summary of the tool’s premise. It seeks to establish or reinforce face-to-face connections that are a critical part of business relationships. The tool allows you to record 60 second video messages and send them to clients, prospects or new social media followers via Twitter, LinkedIn or email. You can use a webcam, an iPhone, an Android or a tablet to record your message, and the use of this tool can increase close rates by 34%.  In today’s digital environment, brands must rely on more human, more authentic means of communication if they want to truly connect and engage with their audiences. Remember when you wanted to send a thank you card to a customer for a recent lunch meeting, but you didn’t have any around the office? You could’ve sent a Vsnap. That time you connected with a prospect on Twitter? A Vsnap could’ve solidified that connection better than a simple tweet.  

3.      Hearsay Social

 It’s hard not to hear about a company started by executives from Starbucks and Microsoft. This social media management platform caters to corporate/local brands, clients that have a national presence and local franchises. The web-based software allows the two halves of each client to coordinate their social media posts and presence: the corporate half can monitor local engagement, including detailed analytics and posts that may step outside of corporate or industry guidelines, and the local half has the ability to manage their own social media posts.

If you’re part of a brand that relies heavily on local franchises and you’re looking for a digital marketing tool that allows you to centralize your social media efforts, Hearsay Social may be the newest addition to your toolkit. 

By: Susan Gail Taylor, Social Media Manager and Copywriter at RME360

"You Are My Cup of Tea": How to Create Fabulous Customer Experiences

Do you create fabulous experiences for your customers? Is your brand their cup of tea?

Check out this infographic for tips of how to improve your customers’ experience with you. Click here for the enlarged image. 

By: Susan Gail Taylor, Social Media Manager and Copywriter at RME360