Response: The Complete Guide to Profitable Direct Marketing - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lois K. Geller runs the Lois K. Geller Company Inc. in New York City and counts leading corporations from around the world, small businesses, and entrepreneurs among her clients. Before starting her own company, she worked for three of the largest advertising agencies in the world. Geller is active in the Direct Marketing Association and teaches Direct Marketing at New York University and at several large companies. She is the winner of a gold ECHO Award, eight Andy Awards, and several gold CDMA RSVP Awards.

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Why Go Direct?

Every semester for the past five years, students have been crowding into a small, overheated classroom at New York University. These are not your ordinary degree-seeking students - these are innovators, inventors, importers, advertising account managers, catalog publishers, entrepreneurs, and small-business owners. They've all come to my class on Direct Marketing to learn what this industry's insiders already know: that Direct Marketing is the fastest growing, most cost-effective method of selling products and services in our country today.

Direct Marketing - a measurable, tested marketing method whereby products or services are offered to a targeted audience and a direct response is solicited - is a $95 billion business. Every time you receive a subscription letter, fund-raising solicitation, or catalog in the mail, or reply to an advertisement in print, on radio, or on television, you are a participant in a Direct Marketing campaign.

The people who come to class at NYU (like the woman who makes children's toys and clothes at home and wants to start a mail order business, and the building contractor whose only previous advertising success has been his ad in the Yellow Pages) don't have billions of dollars to spend. On the other hand, we also have students who are high-level executives at IBM, AT&T, and other large corporations who want to build loyalty among their customers, who want to build name recognition, and who want to venture into new areas of marketing.

This book is addressed to all those students, to small-business owners and entrepreneurs, and to marketers at larger companies who want to branch out using Direct Marketing methods - to anyone who would like to get in on the successful strategies and concepts of the Fortune 500. What this book will tell you is how you can use the same Direct Marketing tactics the experts are using - within your own budget.

This book will:

* Provide you with step-by-step, scientifically planned, tested, and proven Direct Marketing tools and techniques that can be used in any type of business;
* Include case studies and illustrations that demonstrate how these tools and techniques have been used successfully by businesses (including examples of direct mail letters, reply envelopes, flyers, coupons, ads, and television and radio campaigns);
* Describe how these same tactics can be scaled down to fit smaller budgets without losing their impact and effectiveness;
* Feature interviews with industry professionals in all areas of Direct Marketing, including creative directors, computer specialists, copywriters, fulfillment experts, printers, and, most importantly, entrepreneurs, business owners, and marketers who have successfully started and grown their own Direct Marketing enterprises. These stories from experienced professionals will prove the effectiveness of the tips and techniques offered in this book, and will help you understand how to implement these ideas in your own situation.

The Advantages of Direct Marketing

Although it seems as if Direct Marketing is a recent phenomenon, it's been around since the '90s - the 1490s! According to Nat Ross's A History of Direct Marketing (published by the Direct Marketing Association), catalogs have been traced back to the Middle Ages, soon after Gutenberg's invention of movable type. The oldest catalog on record was dated 1498, when Aldus Manutius of Venice offered fifteen books he had published by Greek and Latin authors.

The first form of a "customer satisfaction guarantee," a staple of Direct Marketing today, came from none other than Benjamin Franklin, who printed a catalog (featuring more than 600 books) with the following statement: "Those persons who live remote, by sending their orders and money to said B. Franklin, may depend on the same justice as if present."

It was in 1872 that Aaron Montgomery Ward produced his first catalog, and the era of mail order as we know it was born. It was his idea to purchase large quantities of merchandise at a discount from manufacturers and sell this merchandise to farmers through the mail. By 1904, however, Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck had taken over as mail order leaders, when their catalog circulation reached over one million. Pioneers in the Old West relied on the Sears & Roebuck catalog for all their needs: clothes, farm equipment, household appliances, toys, dishes, pots and pans. Everything you could think of was available from that one source. Over the years, Direct Marketing expanded from catalogs to include direct mail campaigns, direct response print advertising, TV, radio, and interactive computer programs.

Today, you may have to go to a variety of sources, but you can still buy almost anything through catalogs, personalized mailings, and direct response advertising. Here are just a few of the usual - and unusual - items you can now get through Direct Marketing, right from your home (not to mention your home itself, which you can get direct from the real estate cable channel). Some of these items are marketed by huge corporations. Many are from tiny companies that specialize in one type of product or even one single product:

Computers, software, vinyl siding, spices, insurance, septic tank cleaner, CD-ROMs, checks, furniture, food, jewelry, Fruit of the Month, Beer of the Month, Coffee of the Month, Potato of the Month, Vidalia onions, telephone services, credit cards, magazines, Urology and You Newsletter, mutual funds, time shares, insurance, books, vacations, music, tea, discontinued silver patterns, hazelnuts, apricots, mattresses, dinosaur bones, exercise equipment, steak, pet products, art, carbide cannons (ammunition extra), teddy bears, furniture, gargoyles.

What's obvious from this list is that almost any product can be sold using Direct Marketing techniques. It is the most effective method of making a product or service visible and available to those people who are most likely to buy. Some of the reasons for its effectiveness are:

* Measurability. Carole Ziter, founder and president of Sweet Energy, a Vermont-based company that specializes in selling apricots, dried fruits, nuts, and chocolates through the mail, started her company out of her home with a $200 expenditure. Now that it's a $2 million business, Ziter says, "I love Direct Marketing because it's such a controllable situation. I wouldn't want to go retail. With Direct Marketing, I know if I put something in the mail, I get a response. If I don't put something in the mail, I don't get a response. I can control my business. Not only that, I can track everything so I know exactly how I'm spending my money."

Direct Marketing is the only form of advertising that is measurable. You know exactly how many responses you get, and where those responses are coming from. That information can be used to make decisions about continuing, expanding, or reworking your marketing plans.

* Testing. The reason that big businesses are so successful with their Direct Marketing is that, as in scientific experimentation, each step is carefully tested, and its results analyzed, before another major step is taken. Large companies like L.L. Bean, Lands' End, and Victoria's Secret test different offer structures (an offer represents the terms under which a specific product or service is promoted, such as a particular price point, a discount, a premium incentive, or sale price). A Lands' End catalog on the East Coast, for instance, might contain one type of offer, and the same catalog on the West Coast have a different offer.

A small business can do tests as well. Many small-business owners and entrepreneurs will send out one letter or place one ad, get a disappointing result and give up. Perhaps...