I recently received 2 coupons from a local grocery store, the first to my fiancé, and the second to an indecipherable name.  Both saved me $5 off a minimum dollar spend amount.  Frankly, receiving two was great for me, but it got me wondering about how much it was costing the grocery.

Let’s look at the numbers:

I ran a count on the Altair Online System, and in Williamson County, TN alone we have 67,718 households.  As a conservative estimate, I am going to say that 2% of those are duplicate mailing addresses or incorrect name/address.  That gives us a remaining 1,354 for incorrect “junk.”

Average printing and mailing costs per piece may be anywhere from $1.00-2.00 per piece based on a large direct mailer I checked out online.  This doesn’t sound too bad on a per piece basis, but when you consider the 3,386 times $1.50, you’re looking at $2,031 in wasted marketing dollars.  And that’s in ONE county, with ONE mail piece.  It also doesn’t take into account that I now have more than one $5 coupon.  Now, consider that there are 110,483,968 households in the country.  I’ll let you do the math.

Point is, marketing dollars can be easily wasted if you don’t have the correct data and/or a streamlined system between your different channels.  As mentioned in our Loyalty study results, one of the largest struggles for companies is data integration.  This new “Big Data” nightmare can really add up on the cost side of marketing, but we can help!

Whether you have a website, coupons and direct mail, a digital & social media presence, a newsletter, or all of it!  We can segment your customer base data across all these different platforms.   For example, who is using your coupons and is also visiting the website frequently?  Who is receiving your newsletters but does not yet buy your products?  We can take the data and consumer information from all these platforms, including your POS, Accounting, Web, etc. and clean it up for you, then link it all into a single standardized database.  Voila!  Increased ROI and less waste in marketing.

Sitting in a meeting with a client the topic of marketing measurement came up. I have worked with this client for almost a year now and it was the first time I was able to get them to look past response rate. A break through!

In the business of direct marketing we tend to focus on creative, print cost, production cost, and response rate. But many stop there. What about the other metrics on measuring a successful campaign.

read more

In the early 70′s, industry experts predicted that paper checks would disappear in place of paperless transactions.  In the early 80′s, once again so-called experts forecast the demise of the paper check by 1990.  Now, almost 40 years from the initial prognostications and there are still well over 20 BILLION paper checks processed every year.

read more

Integrated direct marketing is a marketing campaign that includes multiple channels such as direct mail, email, and web.  An important, yet neglected piece of this marketing puzzle is integrating retail purchases with web purchases.

There are several new companies such as richrelevance led by ex-Amazon and ex-Ebay-type leaders with all types of terrific products for improving the relevance of marketing offers online.  Yet few, if any are linking in-store purchases with the online activity.  So, how can you get the most out of your integrated direct marketing campaigns if your not looking across all of your channels?  More importantly, how can you capture the instore information?

read more