Tips from the top
Nick Baggott is a CIM fellow and course director and founder of Navigate Consulting
1. Be clear about your objective: lead generation versus relationship building, upsell versus cross‑sell, sales versus service, educate versus inspire, and so on.
2. Start with the customer: who are they? How will you segment them? What do you know about them and their behaviours? Are you talking to customers or prospects? Will they have gate keepers you need to get past? How environmentally conscious are they?
3. Research their media habits: if you have the budget for an agency then that is a great place to start. If you don’t, conduct your own research. Consider how they spend a typical day.
4. Allow people to opt out by channel: don’t keep sending the paper catalogue to those who buy online.
5. Consider how complex your message is: DM is physical and tactile – people open it and experience it. If you want to reveal the message gradually or if you want to include extra information, samples or vouchers, then traditional DM may be the best option.
6. Focus on your call to action: if you want to drive traffic to your website or social media channel, it is one click away from the e-mail. This is not the case in DM and telemarketing.
7. Personalisation is key: treat different people differently. E-mail and telemarketing are simple to personalise. DM customisation is now easier with digital printing, but is still generally more expensive.
8. Test and learn: you will have to wait longer for responses from traditional DM, but will get almost instant results from telemarketing and e-mail. You’ll get more data too. With DM the outcome is either response or no response. With e-mail you know if it is delivered, opened or clicked on, and which content has attracted attention.
to magazine
