The Direct Marketing Mindset: It's About Customers, Not Just Sales
Friday, January 9, 2009 at 11:42AM During an initial meeting with a national jewelry retailer, the VP of Advertising mentioned they mailed over 20 million catalogs each year. I asked him what the results were. He told me he did not know exactly but knew that the mailings increased sales. So even though he could not quantify it's impact (he never tested it), no one in the company dared challenge the seasonal catalog mailings.
This response from a retailer no longer surprises me because a large part of the industry still works under the illusion that everyone is a customer. Some retailers treat prospects and customers the same way by sending them the same offers using the same contact strategies.
In fact, many large retailers still do not maintain relational databases to track sales at the customer level that would enable them to evaluate the effectiveness of their advertising. They are also unable to modify offers based on a customer‘s past purchase history.
So what causes this blind spot in certain businesses?
In the recent editorial in Target Marketing Magazine, Denny Hatch may have expressed a concept that could help these companies understand the importance of building state of the art relational databases. He said:
"As direct marketers we're not here primarily to make a sale; we're here to get a customer."
This strategic shift in thinking helps clients grasp the core concept of the direct marketing strategy.
Direct marketers do not create one off direct marketing campaigns, but rather build incremental revenue by leveraging customer databases. In a way, sales come as a result of the marketer's priority of acquiring the right kind of customers and then surrounding those customers with multiple offers to convert them from one time buyers into repeat buyers.
Do you work in an environment that is so intent on asking for the sale that the company has forgotten that a every sale starts a customer? If so, have you noticed if this mind-set causes the company to squander selling opportunities?
Reader Comments (3)
Part of the problem may be that many large businesses aren't direct marketers, they just use direct marketing media in the mix. The company culture could lean toward a retail mindset, for example, and those doing direct marketing find themselves adapting to the prevailing mindset and not doing their job correctly.
My rule is that if a company doesn't make 75% or more of their revenue from direct marketing, they aren't really a direct marketing company. And too often, they just aren't interested in the rigor of DM.
In other words Dean, we shouldn’t waste our time with clients that are not already 1-to-1 marketers. If they don’t get the need to look at their business through the eyes of the customer, then we are just spinning our wheels.
I like your analysis of the kind of client you can help. You and I both look at the business opportunity in essentially the same way.
It’s really about the client qualification process. Just because clients have a direct marketing opportunity does not mean that every one will share our direct marketing vision.
This is a hard lesson for direct marketers to learn.
Ah..I just posted something to this effect as a comment to another post. And now I realize that you had already said it much more clearly.
Akin