Respecting the Opt Out List

In honor of the death of John Jay Daly, former president of the Direct Marketing Association and  founder of the program that allows consumers to opt out of direct mail marketing campaigns, I thought it be valuable to revisit the topic of email and direct mail marketing preferences.

The most prevalent misinformation about e-mailing lists is that they are readily available and cheap. When businesses started abandoning dmail in favor of email, most of them argued that it would be much cheaper and wondered why anyone would still rely on the USPS. Aside from an entire sideline conversation about the way consumers like to receive their communications, the important point to make here was that because of list compilation guidelines and user preference obligations established by the US CAN SPAM legislation, email lists are not easily available and certainly aren’t cheap.

The direct marketing industry learned long ago that it had to respect the rights of recipients and that is when the opt-out programs began. You may not notice but at the bottom or on the back of nearly every direct mail solicitation you receive from a major firm is an option to Opt-Out of future mailings. You can do this by mailing a request to the address provided. You can thank John Jay Daly for this.

Fast forward 35 years and you find the DMA wrestling with the same privacy issues and email. With that discussion along came CAN SPAM legislation. But the Email rules are much tougher, requiring that recipients OPT IN the first time and that mailers provide an Opt Out method every time. It is precisely these rules that make high quality, reliable email marketing lists tough to come by and expensive to mail. This isn’t to say that they aren’t available. You can rent them but you can’t bank the records. And it doesn’t work like direct mail programs where you license the list and it is delivered to your bonded mail house. With rental email lists, the list stays with the list owner and you pay not only for the use of the list but to have them deliver your communications to the list they own.

Suddenly, email marketing isn’t necessarily cheaper than direct mail marketing.

As frustrating as this may be to marketers, it isn’t entirely a bad thing. Think of it like the no soliciting sign in businesses or perhaps in your neighborhood. By giving notice to vendors that you aren’t interested in their solicitations should save them $$ (assuming they read).

As professional marketers we see this as a way to deliver much more targeted messages only to those people who are truly interested, thereby increasing the deliverability of our marketing programs and ultimately the ROI (fewer mailed pieces, even at a higher per piece cost, are much more valuable if we reach more prospects and have less waste).

Common Problems in Marketing Plans

WSJ published a great piece early this summer entitled How to Write a Good Business Plan that starts off pointing out why a down economy is a great time to start a new business (lower costs, less competition) and then goes on not to tell you about the right way to do everything but some of the pitfalls to avoid.

I had fun with the piece but was drawn mostly to the table (at the end of the online version) that cites overused phrases/concepts in really bad business plans including two of my favorite pet peeves:

1. HUGE — as in the market in so huge, everyone is going to want to buy our product. Get a grip. there may be lots of biz opportunity out there but if you can’t quantify your market opportunity, you’re never going to be able to put together a business plan much less a marketing plan to go after them. I’m constantly faced with owners who want to market to everyone… and can’t afford it.

2. NO COMPETITION — For real? There are very few entirely new concepts out there, just new and better ways of marketing them. Don’t be so naive to think that you have no competition. Everyone has competition. The trick is figuring out who they are and how to do a better job of attracting customers.

If you’re in the market to write a new business plan, you may find the updated release of Biz Plan in a Day from Rhonda Adams to be helpful. I’m not endorsing her product as the best solution but for a quick and dirty workbook to get you started, it is definitely a running start.

Increase in Advertising Spending = Recovering Economy or Desperation?

About six months ago I started encouraging clients to take advantage of the pull back in advertising spend to make their dollar go further by taking advantage of greatly reduced rates. My clients don’t do a lot of display but the same mantra held true for most of the available media at the time.

Over the summer I noticed an uptick in marketing spend in my business serving the SMB space and subsequently confirmed the same was true with my counterparts serving the medium enterprise and global corporation space. Conjecture might say this signals a turn in the economy, but is that true?

The WSJ reported this morning that the dental market is seeing a 10% drop on average in patient billings largely due to unemployment rate. People without dental insurance stop going and those high brow vanity treatments don’t seem as important when we’re counting our pennies. The article goes on to describe how dentists are having to get creative with their marketing efforts and spend less time seeing patience and more time recruiting them. The old reminder postcards aren’t bringing patients in as fast and thus dentists are trying the same tricks as everyone else: email campaigns and twitter.

So perhaps the increase in marketing spend is just a sign that business are finally having to do what we marketing folks have told them all along: focus on your best prospects, show love to your best clients, identify to your competitive advantage and then promote it in more ways than buying one ValPak envelope a year and putting your initials on the door?

I think what in fact what is happening is that certain businesses are preparing to thrive. They’re establishing a robust infrastructure, staking their claim on their space and working harder to protect their brand. It’s not just a marketing investment that will help them succeed. It’s their overall investment in their business from people to technology that is helping them ramp up and prepare to take market share from the competition who instead of investing has squeezed every available dime out of their business and hidden it under the mattress.

SunTrust Advertising Implies They are Immune to M&A; Is that a Safe Bet?

Call me picky if you like, but I actually listen to the words in the radio and TV commercials and read the ad copy in magazines and on direct mail pieces. My family refers to it as an obsession, but I consider it professional research.

In the car this weekend I listened to a SunTrust ad about a new customer who after finding that his bank had been recently acquired and the new staff had no idea how that would effect his accounts decided to move to SunTrust. Why? Because they’d been in the same convenient corner location that he’d past for the last 5 years on the way to work.

The ad is part of their “solid” campaign and is designed to convince you that they have some greater level of stability than the other banks. Pardon me, but I think that is a risky message. I’m not a banker (nor do I currently have any banking clients) and this is far from a commentary about the stability of SunTrust but about the fact that you need to be careful what you put in advertising so it doesn’t come back to bite you.

Convenience is great and a sound reason for the actor to switch bank. Certainty that they will be the same bank in 5 years is a tough bet. Have you seen the bank failure rates in Georgia lately? And even after a recovery, there’s still no guarantee that M&As won’t continue.  That’s part of the evolution of the banking business, even SunTrust’s evolution. I remember when Trust Company of Georgia merged with Florida’s SunBank to form SunTrust.

But back to my point: be careful what you put in your advertising and marketing materials. Opinions and position papers are one thing and consumers recognize them as such but shouting messages in your advertising campaigns that may not hold water in 6 or 12 months may come back to bite you. And if banking customers are so fickle that they leave every time a bank merges, there is a lot of new account opening business to be had.

Planning to Use Social Media is Not the Same as Planning Your Social Media Strategy

Back when everyone read Kotler’s marketing textbook and set about defining an approach to the 4 P’s, businesses had marketing plans. The plans specified the who and the what of the business before getting into the sexier issues of how we’re going to do it.

Lately folks seem to have that engine backwards. They’re skipping past the planning stages — where we identify our audience, the value of our product, the competition and our competitive advantage — and running right along to a marketing strategy which sounds suspiciously like quick throw up a web site (no pun intended) and start tweeting about our biz and see who comes runnning.

Tweeting about your beer special may have brought 6 customers in for free pint glass night at Taco Mac (see article in this morning’s AJC), but it certainly isn’t a big enough marketing success to make a difference in your quarterly revenues.

David Armano took the time to draw parallels between application design and social media planning in a witty post that draws humorous analogies to watching MacGyver. He makes an extremely valid point about social media being more than a tool but an entire approach to your business while endorsing the idea that before you dive head first into this new universe and start pontificating about the transparent and customer-centered approach of your business that you take the time to make sure your reality aligns with your on-line identity.

While being honest is important (albeit critical), the other really important issue to address here is one of consistency. If twitter is something you do in your free time, blogging happens occasionally when your PR firm reminds you and facebook has been relegated to your summer intern, you should stop now. It’s not a strategy if you just do it once. That’s called dabbling. If you’re serious about using social media to promote your business, make sure your plan not only identifies which platforms you plan to use and what you plan to use them for but includes a budget (time and money and resource allocation) to keep it going far past the next quarterly sales meeting.