Tips to help you take your marketing to the summit – Sherpa style

By: Linda Formichelli

Sometimes the best ideas are the simple ones. MarketingSherpa is a research firm that tracks what works – and what doesn’t work – in all aspects of marketing. Every year, the MarketingSherpa editors compile marketers’ best tips into their marketing Wisdom Report.

“We’ve been doing the report for five years now, and the number of submissions keeps growing each year. There’s quite a competition to get included in the report,” says Tad Clarke, editorial director of MarketingSherpa. “The Wisdom Report lets marketers help other marketers. We let them share their test results or strategies with one another so everyone can learn from each other and, ultimately, improve their marketing.”

We chose five representative tips from the 110 entries in Marketing Wisdom for 2007. To download the full PDF report, go to wisdom.marketingsherpa.com.

Here are some choice picks from this year’s report:

1. Stand out with a gift

When Logos Bible Software found that many recipients were deleting their marketing e-mails unread, they realized that direct mail was the way to go. Their problem: standing out among all the other mail in their prospects’ mailboxes during the holidays. So at Christmas they sent prospects a package – after all, who can resist opening a box at Christmas? – with a branded water bottle and a coupon inside. They had a 15-percent response rate and generated 400 percent of the program’s cost in sales. “They truly tried to do something different from sending Christmas cards and break out of the clutter of the holiday mailbox,” says Clarke.

2. Inform instead of sell

YellowPagesProfit.com‘s job was to improve upon the sales letter of a client in the real estate industry. Their original letter was the typical hard sell. The revamped letter educated the recipient about a little-known mortgage service and included a real-life case study of a customer who refinanced their home using the service. The new letter garnered four times the response of the old one, and the consumers who called were actually grateful for the information. “So much today is sell, sell, sell, but being a useful resource is very valuable, too,” says Clarke. “We don’t always have to hit people over the head with a marketing message – make it a resource that people will come back to.”

3. Keep the message consistent

An Ohio-based marketer created a well-tested campaign that drove people to the client’s Web site, but unfortunately the site gave prospects a mixed message: While the client was in the business of providing investment help – and that’s what the marketing campaign was about – the Web site unintentionally made the company look like a mortgage lender. The direct mail campaign pulled in three times the response of the client’s previous efforts, but once prospects got to the Web site and saw the mixed message, they failed to convert. “It goes back to synergy,” Clarke says. “When you’re doing multichannel marketing, make sure it’s the same message throughout all your channels.”

4. Double-check mailing lists

Sometimes, it’s the people whom you don’t mail to that make the most difference in your campaign. KC Associates created a direct mail campaign with expensive, personalized components: CDs with three company videos and several PDF files on its services, plus an insert with a superhero image that matched the gender of the recipient. Each insert had a printed message reading “[Recipient's Name] vs. the Supply Chain,” implying that the recipient could be a hero by using the company’s services. But because the pricey packages were personalized, the company wouldn’t be able to reuse any returned packages. So after building a list, staffers called each company to verify the name, title and address. The result? More than
30 percent of the prospects watched the CD, 6 percent entered the sales cycle, and a third of those converted, producing more than $500,000 in revenue. Says Clarke, “If you’re not using the right and most up-to-date list and segmenting it down to the right number of people, you’re wasting a lot of money.”

5. Keep URLs short

The direct marketing firm DME created two campaigns that were similar in strategy and data quality, and couldn’t figure out why one pulled in so many more responses than the other. Eventually it became clear: The more successful campaign sent prospects to a Web site with a shorter URL, or Web address. “The shorter and more memorable you can keep it, the better,” says Clarke. “This makes it easier for people to remember, especially if they’re not next to a computer when they read it.”