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Typically, we don’t see serious direct response marketing (Kennedy-style) segmentation and measurement activity out of big corporate.
But that may be changing - not only by recognizing the value, but by seeing action taking place.
Last month, a business owner in Billings received a dark chocolate sample pack (co-op advertising with the manufacturer). The sender was the local grocery store, a national chain.
While they didn’t personalize the mailing like a local retailer should, they clearly had paid attention to what was on their sales demographics, by using checkout data when this person used their loyalty card at the grocery store, then segmenting using that data when doing their mailing. Again, another reason why YOU should have a loyalty/reward card system in place - even the grocery chains have figured this out.
Even large corporates are recognizing the necessity of direct response marketing.
In “Beyond Loyalty, Meeting the Challenge of Customer Engagement” (2007), the Economist (Magazine) Intelligence Unit, sponsored by Adobe, noted these numbers in research done with CEOs.
A few findings from this document:
- More than 80% of C-level executives believe their company loses sales each year because of their failure to engage customers.
- 47% said that the difficulty of measuring customer engagement is the biggest barrier to achieving greater levels of engagement.
More info about the research: http://www.adobe.com/engagement/
A slide show from WebTrends based on this paper can be found at https://admin.acrobat.com/_a162502/the4rs/ and a white paper on the same topic at http://www.webtrends.com/4rs/
The first 7-8 minutes of the video cover some things that any direct response marketer should already be well aware of, but it is interesting to see them applied by a large consumer brand company for a change.
The rest of the video is a light pitch for WebTrends and their tool’s ability to help apply this “new language of marketing” (as WebTrends calls it, though it isn’t new to anyone in the direct response world, of course).
Still, it’s a worthwhile example that discusses the why of knowing your customers better than anyone, and how that can be valuable.
Let the pitch come, as the points made as they get to that point are certainly worthwhile and applicable in a direct response marketing world. Take in the direct response marketing lesson, and go apply it.
Measure and segment. And keep at it.
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