By Robert J. Ritter, President, First Direct Corp.

1. List Development and Maintenance

Your business’s house file is one of its most valuable assets, so it deserves to be cared after. Dirty data is one of the biggest killers of direct marketing campaigns! Dirty data is data which is outdated, incorrect or incomplete. 

Data depreciates rapidly.  It’s important to keep up with the corrections, additions and deletions as you learn about them.  It's more difficult to track-down the information in the future. When it comes time to do a direct marketing campaign, be it direct mail, telemarketing, broadcast fax or e-mail, if the list isn’t ready it’s usually too late to begin building it or cleaning it up.

List development and maintenance is a time consuming and tedious job. Typically the people who know about the changes and additions don’t take the time or make the effort to enter it; nor do they supply the information to administrators to do it for them.

Another common problem is the database software. It may not be designed to accommodate important information such as email addresses or web sites or other contacts, etc.  Adding to the problem is the fact that users often lack the knowledge or receive the training they need to use the software properly or anywhere near to it’s potential.

Who’s the guardian of your database? Do you have procedures for data collection and entry? Has your staff been given adequate training? Does everyone appreciate how important it is for them to do their part in the process of developing and maintaining the database?  Don't let dirty data kill your next marketing campaign!

2. Inbound Telemarketing

The dynamic between you and the prospect or customer is different when they call you versus when you call them. When the phone rings, you’re in control. When you call them, it’s very often an intrusion, a nuisance.

Prospects are more patient when they call you. Imagine making a sales call and the moment the prospect gets on the phone you ask to put them on-hold; they’d probably hang-up if you do. Conversely, when someone calls you, there’s nothing uncommon about putting the caller on hold to listen to your commercials while you get the information or person they’re looking for.

Incoming callers are more tolerant of qualifying questions. Imagine making a sales prospecting call and before you tell the person anything about your products or services you ask them a slew of questions from basic contact information to qualifying questions. Forget it! But, when they call you, most callers don’t raise any objections if your receptionist collects information such as the company name, their name and title, their address, phone, fax, and email before putting the call through. Then when the sales representative picks up the call, they could even ask a few more qualifying questions, and the caller would still more than likely cooperate.

Considering the tremendous advantage companies have in collecting information from inbound prospects or even existing customers, it’s a wonder that strategically planned efforts are not organized and executed to do so. Think of all the possibilities – data collection is just the tip of the iceberg. You could conduct short surveys on trends, needs or satisfaction. Why not tell them about special announcements or promotions! Sure, you’ll need to invest in training. You may even want to go so far as to provide a caller identification system that integrates your phone system with your database so that the phone call triggers a screen-pop of the customers’ or prospects’ record.  The potential for inbound telemarketing is highly overlooked by many businesses!  Given all the potential for inbound telemarketing, hearing the phone ring should be like hearing the cash register ring!

3. Marketing Research

What do you know about your competitors’ pricing? How about your customers’ demographics? How are the latest trends going to effect your industry? Have you analyzed what you’re cost per lead is by source or your cost per new customer by source? Have you mapped your customer base and done a penetration analysis to see what percent of the market you’ve penetrated and how large the market is of other similar businesses in the same geographic area that you could be targeting?

Knowledge is power. You can use marketing research as a means to develop or strengthen your competitive advantage. Research can turn-up new market opportunities. Most businesses do not have anyone within them with the expertise to do market research, so it just doesn’t get done. Everyone’s too busy working "in the business", rather than "on it" as Peter Drucker says. Either you use marketing research to get ahead, or one day you’re liable to wake-up to the realization that some competitor used it to take your business away!  When it comes to marketing the maxim is, What you don't know, CAN hurt you!

4. Testing

What if you could increase the response to your advertisements by 50% just by changing your headline? Suppose you could generate 20% more replies to your direct mail just by changing the style envelope you mail it in? How do you know that another offer is not twice as appealing as your current offer? In order to truly optimize the return on your marketing & advertising expenditure you need to test different methods.

Poor marketing & advertising results may be a reflection of a flawed decision process. It’s amazing to me that companies put so much trust in so few people’s intuition! Testing provides a basis for sound decision making. Testing is how we give new ideas a chance to challenge our existing ones; it gives you the chance to discover a better approach. Only the consumer’s actions will tell you which headline or offer they prefer. That’s why you should test! It also why I tell my students and my clients...The best test, and the rest guess!

5. Marketing Consulting

When you boil it down, a marketing consultant’s role is to make you more money than you pay them; otherwise, what’s the point! As self-serving as it is for me to add marketing consulting to the list, it’s still true. Just because so many aspects of marketing & sales are common sense, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a specialized body of knowledge that a good marketing consultant can bring to your organization. Just a marketing or sales director thinks they know it all, doesn’t mean they do.  Just because you’re knowledgeable of your industry, doesn’t mean you’re as knowledgeable of marketing as a full time marketing consultant. Just because you have years of first-hand experience of marketing & selling your products or services, doesn’t mean that a marketing expert doesn’t have valuable experience you can learn from.

Direct marketing is rich with codicils and cannons that you’re probably not practicing. There are techniques and methods for lifting response you're not aware of.  There are patterns of success and important best practices that you may be unknowingly violating. In addition to helping you to validate or develop your marketing strategies and campaigns, or introducing you to new resources and talented service providers, a marketing expert can be a catalyst to a breakthrough idea which propels your business to a greater and more profitable level!