Chapter 5
Getting Your Message Out: Marketing Campaign Basics
In This Chapter
Preparing a bulk mail file for the U.S. Postal Service
Honoring opt-out requests
Ensuring a timely and high-quality mailing
Keeping track of what you’ve done
Limiting the number of campaigns you send to a customer
Database marketing campaigns cost money. In this chapter, I discuss some ways of managing that cost, particularly with respect to direct mail. In addition to cost-management this chapter is also about quality control. The techniques that I discuss here are standard procedure in the world of database marketing.
I also address another kind of cost: Overcommunicating with your customers can cause them to tune out. Whether you’re communicating via direct mail, e-mail, or mobile messaging, customers can and will eventually say enough is enough. They can simply ignore you. Or they can go so far as to formally request that you stop communicating with them altogether. In either case, this degrades the value of your database by reducing the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Paying attention to how often you’re communicating with your customers is an important part of protecting your investment in your database.
The guidelines I discuss in this chapter can help you manage the cost, quality, and effectiveness of your marketing communications. They can also help you preserve the value of your customer database by keeping your customers tuned in to your messages.
Measure Twice, Cut Once: Don’t Skip These Steps
I’ve known a lot of database marketers over the years. Virtually every one of them has a story about learning the hard way how things can go wrong with a mailing. In one case, thousands of pieces of mail were returned as undeliverable. In another, a typo on a postcard offered an unintentionally deep discount. I’ve seen offers of credit mistakenly mailed to hospitalized children.
One reason for these mistakes is that the nuts and bolts of executing a mailing are usually done by a third-party mail house. And even the most competent mail house is not as familiar with your business as you are. Just because something is obvious to you, don’t assume that it’s obvious to your service provider. You need to have audit procedures in place before the mail hits the post office. This section outlines the audits that should be part of your standard operating procedure for every marketing communication.
Needless to say, mistakes can be costly and damaging to your company’s reputation. The good news is that they’re preventable. Even in the mad dash that usually occurs when your mailing is about to drop, there are a few things you should never overlook. That’s what this section is about.
Cleaning up your mail file
In order to manage your mailing costs, you want to take advantage of bulk rates from the U.S. Postal Service. Whether you’re paying first class or standard postage, you can still reduce your postage costs by performing some of the USPS’s functions for them. In particular, standardizing and updating addresses using USPS-approved procedures can significantly reduce the cost of your marketing campaigns. Any credible mail vendor can perform this function for you.
Standardizing addresses
In addition to requiring updated addresses, the USPS also requires bulk mailings to conform to certain address formatting and accuracy standards. In particular, they want to make sure that all the addresses in your mail file match exactly to deliverable addresses in their database.
You normally won't perform this address standardization in house. It's something that's generally done by your mail house. There are literally hundreds of vendors and software packages out there that meet the postal service requirements. In fact, the USPS actively evaluates and approves software and service providers that meet its standards. This formal approval is known as CASS certification. This stands for coding accuracy support system but nobody ever remembers that. Just remember: Never use a mail vendor that isn't CASS certified. A list of such vendors is at www.usps.com/business/certification-programs.htm.
In addition to ensuring that your mail can be delivered, CASS-certified software corrects address errors, recognizes business addresses, and adds the zip+4 codes (the additional four digits appended to your regular zip code) to your bulk mail. All of this reduces your mail costs and increases delivery rates.
Knowing who moved
Chapter 2 talks about the need to keep addresses current in your database. You do that, in part, by using the USPS’s mover database. Updating addresses in this way is commonly referred to as performing an NCOA (which stands for national change of address).
You may be thinking, doesn’t the post office forward the mail anyway? Yes and no. If you pay for first class postage, the mail will be forwarded. But standard postage mail will not.
More importantly, the USPS does not like to forward mail. It’s expensive for them to do. It will not offer you bulk rates, even on first class mail, without some assurance from you that it will not need to forward very many pieces.
One simple way to do this is to address all your mail pieces to Occupant or Current Resident. But although this guarantees that all mail will be delivered, it also guarantees that a lot of it will go straight into the recycling bin on the way from the mailbox to the front door.
The other — better — way to reassure the post office is to update your mail file using the USPS mover database.
Because people move so often, you should update the addresses on your mail file as close to the actual mailing date as is reasonably possible. You don’t have to do it the same day. But if you do it two months in advance, you will likely be missing many movers.
In addition to providing tools to clean up and update your customer addresses, the USPS offers some other services that you may want to consider. In particular, there are a variety of methods for dealing with returned and undeliverable mail. (Chapter 19 describes some resources related to direct-mail services.)
Don’t contact people who don’t want to hear from you
As I discuss in Chapter 3, you must go to great lengths to give people the opportunity to opt out of hearing from you. A critical step in preparing a mail file is to honor those opt-out requests. This amounts to purging addresses that have opted out from your mail file.
You may think you already did this when you pulled the mail file from your database. It’s standard practice to suppress known opt-outs at the time the initial mail file is pulled. But always have the mail house or e-mail vendor do another purge before mailing. Most vendors will insist on doing it anyway to protect their own reputations.
Last-minute purges prevent a couple of problems. First, your initial mail file may have been pulled significantly ahead of the actual mail drop. This means that your opt-outs were not completely up to date when you pulled your mail file. This is particularly important for e-mail addresses. Federal law gives you 30 days before you must honor an e-mail opt-out.
Second, and more importantly, you probably don’t have (or want) direct access to the national opt-out databases I mention in Chapter 3. The national do-not-call registry and the direct mail opt-out registry are maintained independently by the FTC and the DMA, respectively. They’re updated constantly. The only up-to-date opt-outs you have on your database relate to customers who have contacted you directly to opt out. Your mail vendor will have access to the national databases and can suppress those names.
Trust but verify: Proofing the mail piece
If you spend any time in the database marketing field, you will send out a mailing with some sort of mistake on the mail piece. There always seems to be a mad dash as the mailing date approaches: Pricing gets changed at the last minute, someone wants to tweak the verbiage on the mail piece, and so on. All this activity causes a multitude of versions to be sent back and forth between you and whomever is executing the mailing.
Don’t just trust that the correct version of your file is the one that’s being printed. Send someone over there to proof the actual physical mail piece after it has been printed. As a general rule, it’s a good idea to send someone that can proof the copy with an eye toward the business strategy which underlies the campaign. The creative development team shouldn’t be doing the last-minute proofing. This step is particularly important for large campaigns and brand new campaigns.
In the case of e-mail campaigns, you should have the e-mail vendor send you a test e-mail before they mail to your list. Most large e-mail firms have systems that allow you to proof the e-mail through a number of e-mail browser views — Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook, and so on — and also allow you to get a preview of how the e-mail will “render” or look in those different e-mail browsers.
Planting a seed: How to spy on your mail vendor
Include yourself in the mail file. Also include several other people in your company. This allows you to verify that your communication was delivered on time, in high-quality fashion, and without errors. Include a list of company employees —called a seed list — in your marketing database is standard practice. The seed list is routinely embedded in mail files.
Don’t let the mail vendor manage your seed list. And don’t send the seed list separately to the mail vendor. It needs to be embedded in your mail file. Why? It’s not unheard of for a mail vendor to get behind on a project and decide to pick out the seeds and get them mailed first. To be completely effective, it is also a good idea to make sure your seed list includes some people the mail vendor doesn’t work with. The vendor can easily search a mail file for names of the people they work with all the time.
Obvious as it sounds, you also need to make sure the names on your seed list aren’t opted out. You shouldn’t have a problem finding such names. Many marketers don’t register on opt-out databases because they have a professional curiosity about what other companies are doing. It’s also easy to set up dedicated e-mail accounts specifically for seed purposes — just don’t give them company e-mail addresses.
Remembering What You Did: The Importance of Promotion History
All the fussing around you did in the first section of this chapter will have inevitably eliminated some names from your list. That means you need a copy of the final mail file back from your mail vendor. Otherwise, you won’t really know who was mailed.
If your database is well designed, this is typically a pretty easy process. The basic idea is that every customer has a unique customer number or customer ID in your database. Include these customer numbers in the initial file that you send to the mail vendor. The vendor can then simply send you back a list of customer numbers that made the final mail file.
It’s about more than just who you mailed
The presence of customer IDs makes it extremely easy to integrate the final mail list back into your database. You don’t need to do a complicated name and address match and take into account updated addresses. The customer ID is persistent, meaning it doesn’t change as customer contact information is updated. You can perform a clean and simple match based on this ID.
Matching back to your database is important because you care about more than just who was mailed. You care about what was mailed, when, and why. This promotion history can be stored on your database at the individual customer level. Doing that allows you to evaluate and compare different offers, messages, and targeting strategies. It also lets you manage the frequency with which you contact your customers.
Recall the seed list mentioned in the previous section? As I mentioned, keeping track of which customers are seeds is not something you want the vendor to do — you don’t want them to know. But you also want to be able to exclude these seed names when it comes time to evaluate campaign performance. Your promotion history file is a perfect place to flag these seeds.
Many database marketing campaigns use different messages or offers for different groups of customers. A cruise line, for example, might focus on different rate categories for different household income bands. Or it might use different imagery on pieces sent to families with young children versus retired couples. These offers and versions need to be part of your promotion history.
Timing is also important. In order to clearly define what constitutes a response to your campaign, you need to know when the mailing went out. If the mailing featured some sort of special offer, you also need to know when this offer was valid.
Your promotion history is basically your only record of whom you contacted, what you offered them, and when. When deciding what you should include in your promotion history file, it’s better to err on the side of including too much information. It’s better to have information that you don’t end up using than to want information you can’t find.
Documenting your mailing
In addition to promotion history, there are some other aspects of your mailings that you will want to refer back to. For one thing, it’s a good idea to keep samples of your mail pieces on file. These samples can facilitate discussions about the “look and feel” of future campaigns. They can also prevent you from re-inventing the wheel with regard to creative development and copywriting. Most companies I have worked with have large catalogs of past campaign materials.
It is also important to document in detail how you chose which customers to contact. This information is central to understanding how to refine and improve your campaigns. It also makes it much easier to repeat successful campaigns.
Make sure that the technical details of how the mail list was created are documented and stored. You very likely gave instructions to a programmer like “I want to mail customers with teenage children who have bought a widget in the last six months.” The details of how the programmer actually implemented that request might be a good bit more complicated. Those details — by which I mean the computer programs that were used — need to be documented and kept. Ideally, your technical team should maintain a library of computer code that is organized by campaign.
Knowing When to Shut Up: Contact Management
My wife and I took a cruise several years ago. When we returned home, we discovered a marketing packet from the cruise line in our mailbox. It was quite an expensive packet as marketing packets go. It included a high-quality color catalog listing some available itineraries.
Nothing really remarkable about that. Except that two days later we received another one, with slightly different itineraries and dates. The next day we received a postcard with a discounted offer. The day after, an offer to join their frequent cruiser program.
My wife and I had already decided that it was a nice enough cruise, but we weren’t really interested in taking another. But being the curious marketers we are, we wanted to see how long this communication deluge would go on. So we didn’t even attempt to get off of the cruise line’s mailing list.
That was five years ago. Since then, we’ve had four different addresses in three different states. The cruise line keeps finding us, so they’re managing their addresses quite well. But in those five years, I don’t believe we’ve ever gone more than three days without receiving something in the mail from said cruise line. I’m not exaggerating. Most of these are glossy, full-color pamphlets or catalogs, and almost all of them are sent first class.
It’s become a running joke in our house. “Hi honey, I’m home. Where’s the cruise line going today?” And I’m pretty sure that any profit they made from our one cruise has pretty much been spent on marketing by now. From the looks of things, these mail pieces must be costing the cruise line at least a buck apiece for production and postage on average. At two or three per week for five years, that works out to somewhere between $500 and $750. I don’t know what their margins are, but that’s a lot of money to spend fishing for a rebooking.
You can use your promotion history to prevent this type of over-communication with your customers. You don’t want to become annoying. How much communication is the right amount? Unfortunately, there are no hard-and-fast rules for deciding that. A lot depends on your business and the types of communications you’re doing. But surely it’s less than twice a week for five years with no positive response from the recipient.
Make it a priority to develop an explicit policy regarding the frequency of your marketing communications. Such a policy, usually called a contact management strategy, should be a core part of your standard operating procedure. You can certainly review and refine your strategy over time. But it starts with actively paying attention to how often you are contacting your customers — and more importantly, whether or not they are responding.
There are no hard-and-fast rules for what constitutes a good contact management strategy. Your strategy is highly dependent on your industry. It also varies by channel. But there are a couple of things to keep in mind.
First, you don’t need a one-size-fits-all policy. Different customer segments will have different levels of tolerance for your marketing communications. For example, you’ll find that you have a segment of high affinity customers. These are customers who are very loyal to your brand. They will tolerate a much higher level of marketing communication than other segments before they tune you out.
Second, your policy can be different for different channels. Direct mail is to some extent self-regulating because of its cost (my cruise line experience excepted). But it’s very easy to fall into the trap of overcommunicating via e-mail. E-mails are extremely cheap to send. And e-mail campaigns can be developed and executed quickly. But e-mails also provide a great deal of hard data on which to base your decisions regarding how frequently you contact your customers. In Chapter 15, I talk about a variety of metrics that are tracked by your e-mail service provider. These metrics track which e-mails are opened and which customers click the links in the e-mails, among many other things. This information is extremely useful in gauging the interest level of your customers.
Getting agreement on a contact management strategy can sometimes be a challenge. It is particularly challenging for large companies with separate business units that have separate marketing goals and even separate marketing departments. But if everyone is communicating with the same customers, marketing overload will cause those customers to tune everyone out.