Direct mail is one of the oldest marketing tools in the book. As soon as the postal service allowed people to send mail back and forth, marketers were utilizing it to send advertising messages. Over time, the quality of direct mail has eroded to the point that it’s been labeled “Junk Mail” by most people. Internet marketing is following the same path, with spam plaguing e-mail in boxes and Twitter feeds. But if you want to have success you need to be targeting the right people, making your offer as personalized as possible, and then optimize your campaign on an ongoing basis. People are bombarded with advertising messages every day, and they have developed powerful blinders to ignore most marketing messages. By looking at some areas where direct mail fails, you can take away some lessons to make sure you don’t become just another ignored message.
Targeting
The first rule of direct mail is target, target, target! The most important factor in a direct mail piece’s success is the proper targeting of prospects. For direct marketers, this means renting the best lists they can get their hands on. Political campaigns have also honed the science of direct mail targeting by getting into granular details like demographics, sometimes even to the individual household level. Unfortunately, over time direct marketing in many cases has been untargeted which has resulted in the term “Junk Mail”. For internet marketers, trying to do the same thing would result in disaster. You and your business don’t want to be labeled SPAM, do you? Targeting potential customers is very different than with direct mail, but offers much better results. Rather than renting lists and hoping people are intrigued by the offer, internet marketers can use services like Google’s AdWords to target prospects as they search for keywords relating to your business.
Here is where targeting for the internet marketer comes into play. Let’s say you sell project management software targeted to small and medium size businesses. You have perfected your landing page, you have a great product, and you’re starting out a new AdWords campaign today. When you go to select keywords, you choose things like “project management”, or “project management software”. After a couple of days you start to realize that your conversion rates are terrible, but you’re getting a lot of people to click on your ads. What’s the problem? Your keywords aren’t targeting the right prospects! While the term “project management” seems to be in your sweet spot, people could be searching for that term for a lot of reasons other than looking for project management software for small or medium sized businesses. You’re getting curiosity clicks, not interest clicks.
Takeaway: Just as direct mail has been labeled “Junk Mail”, your message can deliver bad results if you don’t target prospects well. When you market on the internet, be sure to target “long-tail” keywords that are very specific. You won’t get a lot of people seeing your offer, but they will be infinitely more qualified and people actually want to see your offer.
Personalization
Direct mail is in theory inherently personalized (in most cases). It has your name and address on it, it’s mailed right to your door, and in many cases it’s been targeted well. But we’ve all seen the junk mail directed to “Our Friend at <insert address here>”. Internet marketing is inherently NOT personalized. But in order to find success you should do everything in your power to make it seem personalized.
There’s a lot of ways this can be accomplished. You’ll never have the name and address of new visitors to a landing page, but make sure that when they arrive they are going to the right landing page. If you have a PPC campaign, make sure that visitors are being directed to a specific landing page for that ad and not just to your home page. Another interesting technique that can be used with AdWords is the personalization of your ad depending on what search terms were used. (Learn more about this technique, known as dynamic keyword insertion )
Takeaway: Internet marketing may not be as personalized as direct mail, but in many ways that isn’t a problem. After all, your prospect is coming to you rather than the other way around. But there are many ways that you can make potential customers feel like it has been personalized towards them. Focus the right landing page towards the right prospect and you’ll see success. Your goal should be to give your prospect the feeling that your landing page was exactly what they were looking for.
Optimization and Analysis
The success and failure of a direct mail campaign is easy to quantify. You send mail out, prospects receive it, and if they’re interested in your offer they will respond. And by sending out multiple versions of design and copy, the most effective can be easily determined. Fairly quickly, a direct marketer is able to determine a variety of things like the reliability of the list, and whether or not the design or copy is working effectively.
In this area, internet marketing is a vast improvement over direct mail. While direct marketers can infer that a particular piece was effective based on response rate, they aren’t there as the prospect reads it. But online, there are a variety of tools like Google Analytics or Clicktale that allow the internet marketer to see exactly how prospects are interacting with their marketing materials. As I discussed in my last article you can even record how visitors use specific pages, where they are clicking on the page, and where they tend to click most often. And using tools like Google’s Web Master Tools, you can conduct multivariate A/B testing to try out different copy, forms, and anything else you can think of.
Takeaway: Direct mail is inherently accountable, but the marketer isn’t there as people see their message. But with internet marketing you can see EXACTLY how people interact with your marketing messages. Tools like Google Analytics, Web Master Tools, Clicktale, and many others give internet marketers a powerful arsenal to analyze and optimize content.
Many of the concepts of direct marketing are similar with internet marketing, but there are key differences with how they are implemented. Despite these differences, there is a lot that can be learned from the experience of direct marketers. When you start a new campaign for your business, be sure that you’re thinking of these best practices that have been developed for more than 100 years.
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