This is the first of the most common measuring tool to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing campaign such as your full color postcard printing. When we say cost per acquisition, it simply means the result of having your target clients respond to your postcard printing ad. You can determine this quantitatively by getting your total cost of mailing your, say, postcards, and then dividing that number by the amount of responses you have.
The cost per acquisition is very important as it helps you to determine whether getting new leads for your business is worth the costs itβs going to take to generate them.
2 β Cost Per Piece
The cost per piece is determined by taking your total cost of mailing your postcards or envelopes and then divide it by the number of pieces you actually sent out. This second measurement is very important to take note of because when you decrease your cost per piece, you also get to lessen your cost per acquisition. Provided however, that you have the same response rate for your print ad.
3 β Response Rate
The third is when you measure your response rate to your direct marketing campaign. You can easily calculate the result by getting the number of people who actually responded to your campaign and then dividing it with the number of people you sent the direct mail package to. The response rate measurement is very important as you can predict early on the success or failure of your direct marketing campaign, whether you choose full color postcard printing or envelope printing for that matter.
Before anything else, you need to understand that advertising is a science in addition to it being an art. When you employ direct marketing in your promotional campaign, you not only make it more scientific, you also get to quantify results making it easy for you to decide on the best marketing campaign to effect.
Use these three direct marketing measurements to your ads and see which of part of your advertising is wasted and which part can best help you to increase your profits.
Business To Business Direct Marketing
When times get tough, it's common for small businesses to cut back on many areas of expenditure.
Marketing budgets often come under the spotlight, especially as many small business owners are never quite sure whether their outlay on intangible or above the line promotional activities like PR and advertising really pay dividends or not.
However there's one form of marketing which is far more measurable, can be used to target existing and new customers, and which can demonstrate a much more favourable return on investment. Direct marketing, in the form of direct mail and telemarketing, is the ideal marketing activity to help you trade out of a downturn.
Here's a number of ideas of how you can retain your clients and generate more business, which use direct marketing techniques either directly or indirectly:
1. Develop closer relationships with your top customers.
In general just 20% of your customers will generate an incredible 80% of your turnover, so you need to identify who they are and make sure you keep them. If you lose one through poor service, you'll know about it.
Analyse your database of customers to find the top spenders, then put in place a programme to keep them including regular newsletter mailings, field sales calls, or regular customer care phone calls. If your largest clients look like they may defect to the competition, consider implementing a rebate scheme whereby they receive retrospective discounts if they achieve agreed purchasing targets.
2. Build greater customer loyalty.
In tough times you need to at least hold onto what you have already got. You also need to look at your customer turnover, to see if you start losing smaller customers who might be going out of business. Start being more proactive with your customers, through regular mailings and out bound telemarketing.
3. Communicate more with the market.
Prevent an opportunity arising for the competition to step into your shoes. If you cutback and stop speaking to existing and potential customers, someone else may jump into the void you have left. You mustn't withdraw into your shell and hope for the best, because by the time the situation improves you may have been forgotten.
Agree a common message you want to communicate, whether it's a product related offer or one of your most important USP's, and then co-ordinate getting this message to the market place over a period of time using a range of different methods, and plenty of repetition. If the market sees the same message over and over, it will realise you are here to stay.
4. Broaden your markets.
Try and identify new avenues for your existing products and services so that you can make the most of what you have already got. New markets could be geographical areas or new industry verticals that you haven't tapped into previously. You can get some clues of potential markets by profiling your existing customer database to see if there any types of customer you were not expecting.
Then decide which new customer types to target and source mailing lists and databases of them, which you can follow up using inexpensive direct marketing. Make sure our mailings include a call to action, and also promote your website which will need to be updated as well.
5. Focus your activities on your core objectives.
Now is the time to reacquaint yourself with your business plan to help remind you of what you are trying to achieve and prevent wasting energy in secondary activities. Bear in mind you may need to update your plans to adapt to changing conditions.
If you haven't got a business or marketing plan, then you need one, to help you prioritise your precious time, money and resources.
Don't attempt to experiment with completely new product ideas unless these innovations can be thoroughly tested and proven on a small scale first.
Conclusion
Direct marketing techniques provide a range of benefits to the business which is looking to keep marketing, but needs to keep a careful eye on its expenditure now more than ever. For example mailing campaigns can be easily planned and scaled to meet your budget, and the results are completely measurable to help you measure your return on investment.
But don't forget that if you are using direct marketing to either existing or potential customers, the quality and accuracy of your data needs to be spot on to avoid wastage and get the best possible results, so make sure you invest in data cleansing and quality lists from only the most reputable of sources. Never be tempted to cut corners by using out of date lists or buying in low cost poorly targeted databases.
Both Lynne Saarte & Stephen Sellwood are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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