Are These Companies Practicing the Direct Marketing Discipline?

You’ve seen dozens, if not hundreds of these direct mail pieces in your mailbox. The ones I am referring to are the post cards pieces that offer a free phone if you sign up now for a 2 year cell phone contract. The others push Internet subscription services with 90 days free for a one-year minimum subscription. They all are usually 4 color mailers with nice graphics and big headlines with a couple of paragraphs of copy.

What stuns me is that these multi-million piece mailers do not practice the fundamentals.

Most of them cannot answer “Yes” to any of these questions.

1. Are you testing offers, mailing lists, and other media to establish winners?

2. Can you track response by customer, by offer and by medium?

3. You are presently using broadcast and print as awareness builders. Do you view direct response print, DRTV and email as direct marketing media opportunities?

I’m not sure what these companies are doing and why they don’t learn from the direct marketing community.

They are selling one-to-one and making an offer. But does this qualify them as direct marketers? Could they dramatically increase their ROI by applying basic DM strategies?

Ted Grigg

Ted Grigg is a direct response strategist who helps growth-focused companies reduce risk by identifying weak assumptions before they become costly mistakes.

Over the course of his career, Ted has evaluated several hundred million dollars in direct response testing across direct mail, digital, print, television, telephone, and other channels. His work combines direct response strategy, acquisition economics, customer analysis, creative evaluation, offer development, and disciplined testing.

Ted has worked on both the client and agency sides of the business. That experience gives him a practical understanding of the pressures facing executives, marketing teams, agencies, and service providers—and of the problems that arise when activity, media volume, or creative preference replaces a clear economic objective.

His consulting work helps organizations examine such questions as:

  • Are acquisition goals economically realistic?

  • Is the allowable Cost Per Sale supported by customer value?

  • Are targeting, offers, creative, media, and response paths working together?

  • Are tests structured to produce reliable business decisions?

  • Are unproven assumptions being treated as facts?

  • Is the organization measuring sales outcomes rather than convenient proxies?

Ted’s experience includes the development of direct mail and multichannel acquisition programs for insurance, healthcare, financial services, technology, nonprofit, manufacturing, retail, transportation, communications, government, and business-to-business organizations.

For a national direct-to-consumer insurance company, he developed a direct mail format that defeated established controls and helped expand the productive use of compiled prospect lists from less than 10 percent to more than 30 percent of total direct mail circulation within one year. He also planned Medicare lead-generation programs for more than 60 regional and national HMO and PPO organizations, with some programs exceeding sales projections by as much as 60 percent.

Ted founded Wyse Direct, a direct marketing division of Wyse Advertising in Cleveland, where he developed acquisition programs and helped launch a new technology product for Seiko Instruments by generating a predictable flow of qualified sales leads for its national sales organization. As vice president of new business development for the Grizzard Agency, he helped broaden the agency’s strategic capabilities and pursue new commercial and fundraising opportunities.

He is the author of The HMO/PPO Marketing Plan—A Step-by-Step Guide, published by Executive Enterprises, and has written numerous articles and conducted webinars on direct response strategy, testing, creative development, and marketing economics.

Ted earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Abilene Christian University and completed two years of graduate study at Texas Tech University. He is the founder of DMCG, LLC.

http://www.dmcgresults.com
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