Ted Grigg's Reflections about Direct Marketing

If you plan and evaluate direct marketing efforts, then you know the challenge of pulling together the essential information for your creative assignment.

Due to the scope of the creative brief required for direct marketing projects, I see the creative brief as a melding of the marketing plan with the creative strategy.

For that reason, the creative director should not be the primary point person for writing the creative brief. That duty falls upon the marketers of the organization.

There are literally hundreds of creative brief formats out there. But they all tend to miss at least one of the essentials parts that can make the difference between success and failure.

Let's start with the characteristics of strong direct response creative briefs.

Effective briefs are:
• Clear about the objective
• Focused and direct
• Logical and brutally truthful
• Rich with emotional insight
• In sync with the overall brand
• The result of information provided by the client, the agency team and any primary/secondary research available about the product or service

Weak briefs are:
• Provided to the creative team without an offer or lack guidance for the development of a compelling offer
• Preoccupied with the client's needs rather than those of the audience
• Incomplete and unconvincing
• Missing concrete and factual support for the claimed product benefits

Looking at the contents rather than the format, here are the four essentials of the DM Creative brief.

1. Get a handle on the product or service benefits.

- What are the benefits offered by this product?
- What is the primary benefit?
- Is there a unique selling proposition?
- What do present customers say about this product?
- What do third parties who are respected by the audience say about this product?
- How does your product compare to competing products or services?
- Compile printed and electronic literature that may already exist about the     product.

2. Share the objective (s) and what we have to do to win? For example...

- Generate actual appointments from key businesses.
- Beat an existing control.
- Enroll new members.
- Convert existing leads to buy the product "off-the-page".
- Remind lapsed members of a deadline for an existing offer.
    _{Note: I like to share any known response rates generated by past efforts telling the creative team what success looks like. Quantify the objectives.}

3. Who are the targeted prospects or customers and what makes them tick?

- Share the list information if it is a mailing going over data contained in the file that can be used for personalization.
- Provide any available psychographic and demographic information about the target market (s).
- Go into the research of why people buy and do not buy the offered product.   
- Get deeply into the emotional motivators of why the audience might buy or not buy the product.
- Summarize key research information about the customer or prospect audience.
- Provide any relevant testimonials or third party endorsements.
- Based on the audience descriptions, what tone should the creative take on?

4. What is the call to action or offer for this particular communication?

- What offers have worked in the past?
- What offers have not worked in the past?
- How much can we afford to spend on the offer based the allowables for this product or service?
- What other offers are worthy of a test?
- What offers have worked for competitors or in other industries to the target audience?

5. How does the target audience view the offered product in the competitive environment?

- Describe any notable messages/content from competitor advertising.
- If possible, give the creative team a comparison chart pitting the offered product against the competition.

6. What are the executional mandatories or "givens"?

- Includes any regulatory or legal copy requirements.
- Provide any graphic guidelines, logos and other graphic support as required for the creative execution.
- Review any verbiage or language that must not be used in the copy.

7. What is the executional budget for this creative effort?

- Provide production limits that take into account the allowable cost per lead or cost per sale.
- Provide direct mail costs limits based on the allowables for any direct mail rollouts.
- Give comparable budgets for online, DRTV, radio or print advertising at the onset of the creative effort.

What other elements would you add to this list that I omitted? How do you deal with clients who cannot provide the specifics needed for your campaign to succeed? Do you turn down the project? Do you go with what you have and cross your fingers warning the client that they need to compile more information for the future? As a client, how do you deal with pesky creative resources that never seem to have enough information?

The editor of Inside Direct Mail, Ethan Boldt, interviewed me recently asking a number of questions related to the importance of the offer in generating response. The range of his questions covered the how, when and what offers to test.

This subject interjects itself into virtually every direct marketing program I touch. So I wanted to give him my best effort when answering his questions.

This blog exposes less than 15% of his questions. Answering all of the questions here would make this blog far too long.

I have come to believe that offer development and testing them separates direct marketers from the pretenders.

If you practice direct marketing programs with any frequency, then you know the major predictors of response. This list provides those predictors by priority.

    1. The target market or lest selection.
    2. The offer
    3. The main or unique selling proposition
    4. The selected medium or combination of synergistic media
    5. The creative execution ( this includes such things as layout, tone, format, correlation to the brand image and so forth)

When estimating the impact, the offer usually carries 40 to 50% of the response burden if the market was targeted correctly. A good offer makes the difference between success and failure. It is not uncommon to see offers that make a difference of 200% or more in the overall response score.

Here are some of the questions the editor asked and my response to each.

Do offers impact response more than creative?

In my mind, offer development is a major part of the creative development. I do not separate these two functions. The offer is central to the creative and holds a starring role in effective direct response copy. So yes, the offer is the most important element in predicting response rates.

How do you evaluate offers?  How do you test them and how often?

Direct mail is still the core medium for direct marketers. It dwarfs all other media in terms of spending levels. So we tend to use the same offers in all media once they work in direct mail.

When evaluating effectiveness, we look not only at costs per lead, but costs per sale. In the insurance business, we actually look at contract persistency by offer, medium and list source going back 3-5 years.

The offers vary by product and the particular regulations of a given industry.

For two-step offers such as lead generation, we go from inexpensive premiums to very expensive gifts like free golf clubs for agreeing to an appointment with C level executives.

For product sales to consumers, we offer FREE services, valuable information, inexpensive premiums or discounts for quick response.

Do you pretest your offers?

The only way we test offers is through behavior testing. We tried focus groups and other pretesting methods. But they did not save us money or accurately predict response in the real world.

Do you ever test offers in email campaigns to save costs?

We typically recommend testing offers with customers. But since most of our clients do not use email for acquisition, we do not test offers via email for getting new customers.

As a general rule, we recommend testing testing offers in the core medium, and then expanding successful offers in non-core media.

For direct mail, how do you use offers in copy? On the outer envelope, the letter, the brochure, the response form?

We like to make the offer the lead.

 

This often mean implying the offer on the outer envelope. But we prefer not to spill the beans on the whole deal here. We want the prospect to open the envelope and read the letter as well as the balance of the contents. So the teaser copy is written to get the recipient to open the package.

In some cases, the product benefit is so strong that we prefer to state the main customer benefit on the outer envelope rather than the offer.

The strongest offers combine the reward for responding with the products' main selling proposition. For example, "Not only are we offering this product to your industry for the first time ever, but we are giving you a 50% discount for being among the first 50 customers to buy."

Once inside, each piece (except for the Business Reply Envelope) should stand alone. This means the offer and key benefits are enumerated in the letter, the response device and the brochure. The offer is indeed the star.

This does not mean that the offer always resides in the main selling proposition copy line. But it is the spark that stimulates interest and prompts immediate orders.

 

Stated differently, put your best food forward in the key locations of your direct mail package. 

-The first line of copy in the letter

-The Johnson box in the letter

- The headline for your response form 

- And finally, a place of prominence in your brochure

The interviewer asked many other interesting questions about the offer. But I will let him compile the other 80% of my missing responses in an upcoming issue of Inside Direct Mail. I will provide you with a link to this article when it is published.

What other comments do you have about offers? What results have you seen when testing your offers. How do you go about developing compelling offers?

 

It seems strange to lead with such a headline. Yet some of my clients expect me to get sales results for them with platitudes.

-We are the biggest.
-Our quality exceeds that of our competitors.
-People will love working with us.
-We will save you money.
-Our products will increase their revenue.
-We give them superb ROIs.

The list goes on forever and the client’s prospects fall asleep. The client complains that they can’t set up appointments with executives or that they are missing their sales targets. I wonder why?

It feels like I am pulling teeth just to get the facts.

-Why are you the biggest? How does that benefit your customer?
-What evidence can you give me that your quality exceeds that of your customers?
-Why would customers love working with you? Have they written testimonials telling you this? Can I have them?
-What proof do you have that you can save customers money? Give me a case study or actual data demonstrating this.
-By how much do you increase revenue? Do you offer a performance contract?
-By how much do you increase customer ROI? Can you give me specific examples?

The client eventually comes up with some useful information complaining all along that their company does not compile this type of information! This statement sometimes comes from clients that are selling multi-million dollar contracts!

So the net of this is a new headline for advertising that works.

“Specifics Sell”

Ninety percent of the success of direct response advertising relies on specifics. Specifics generate more leads and sell more products.

I’m not talking just about product features, but translation of those features into benefits. State the problem you solve and then prove it with specific results you typically deliver. Use testimonials, research and case studies to make your case.

Have you run into this issue in the past? How do you go about persuading your company or client about the importance of collecting the facts before attempting to sell their products or services?  

Here I am sitting at a Starbucks Coffee shop in Coppell, TX having a Grande French Roast with a small amount of milk and a few grains of sugar after a successful client presentation for new business.

As usual, it was a lot of fun and similar to so many that came before.

What strikes me as one of the most difficult lessons to learn is how direct marketing creative executions that work are so counterintuitive to most business people who make the buying decision for creative services.

Things like:

“Short copy is the only thing that works with our customers because they are so busy. So loose the letter and about 80% of the copy in your brochure. And while you’re at it, drop the reply form. You don’t want all of those pieces getting in the way. In fact, just send that shorter brochure in the envelope without including any other enclosures. That’s the kind of mail I respond to."

“How are you going to get people’s attention with that envelope package? They’ll just throw it away without opening it. So create a postcard instead, because the copy is real short and you can put some eye-catching graphics on it with 4-color printing on both sides. Now that will work! They don’t even have to open it!”

If you’ve been in this business for long, you can predict the conversation. Unfortunately, clients are almost always wrong about what works and doesn’t work unless they’ve done a lot of A/B split testing and spent several years doing it in multiple channels. What works is counterintuitive.

But when you think about it, reality or truth usually does not follow the expected pattern regardless of the trade. Only years of direct marketing experience honed by a large volume of testing in multiple channels takes away the counter intuitiveness of successful direct marketing creative work.

When success comes in the form of new clients, the first thing I have to deal with is not finding new customers for them or helping clients keep their present customers. The first task is to save clients from themselves when it comes to developing their creative work.

I suppose David Ogilvy said it best, “If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative.” And benefit-laden copy sells best.

In direct marketing, copy is still king and will usually be the one thing that separates successful direct marketing creative work from the failed campaigns. That statement alone is counterintuitive to what most people believe about great creative work.

So the challenge of selling the direct marketing creative discipline continues.

Does any of this hit a hot button for you? Do you find that successful direct marketing creative work usually contradicts what many believe makes for great creative work? Please share your perspectives on this with me.

Direct mail does not support branding as far as most branders would like for good reason according to James Rosenfield in his excellent article entitled “BRAND AND BRANDING, REVISITED YET ONE MORE TIME AGAIN.”

“Big consumer brands are built on television. This is still true in 2004, in spite of ever-multiplying and fragmenting media.

Why is this? Because television is the archetypal right brain hemisphere medium. Television influences the brain by bringing it into a kind of dream time, when images can creep in, more-or-less subliminally, in a nanosecond. That's why intellectually indefensible notions can be communicated persuasively on TV, that drinking beer makes you attractive to the opposite sex, for example.

Direct mail is the archetypal left-brain hemisphere medium. It's verbal and therefore leisurely, the very definition of how the left hemisphere works. (In fact, in order to make direct mail effective in the 21st Century, left hemisphere communications techniques have to be transmuted into right hemisphere techniques as much as possible.”

He goes on to say that branding in direct mail essentially consists of the logo and slogan. And inserting visuals from the TV advertising does nothing to improve response rates.

This does not mean that direct mail elicits no emotional impact. But that the impact comes from story telling and great letter writing. That probably explains why the letter is so critical to direct mail effectiveness.

Have you gone beyond the logo and slogan in your direct mail testing to see if response rates increased with the use of other branding techniques such as a common look to the graphics and television imagery? If so, what were the results?

 
If you would like to read James Rosenfield’s full article, you can view here.

 

Traditional media still rule in most companies’ budgets. But the day is coming when that may no longer be true.

For example, Jeff Brooks makes the point in his fundraising blog “Direct mail: news of its death may be premature” that direct mail is changing, but that it is far from dead. He says:

“Online is coming up behind it. Fast. Nearly every nonprofit fundraiser is now raising meaningful amounts of money online. Even if they aren't trying very hard.

So you need to be thinking ahead. As a response medium, direct mail is losing ground to online. That change is likely to accelerate in the coming years. If you aren't getting good at raising money online now, you may find yourself suddenly in a world of hurt in the not-too-distant future.”

I believe that most of us in the direct marketing field concede that online is here, it’s growing fast, and we need to inculcate our deep knowledge of what makes people respond into this emerging medium.

The rise and fall of various media normally causes no alarm to direct marketers. Direct marketing strategists are media agnostic. We routinely test in and out of media.

But here’s the rub. Do you think companies really care that you know how to make traditional media work? I contend that most companies do not see the intimate relationship between the direct marketing strategy and their desire to leverage the online medium.

Highly experienced direct marketing strategists, however, believe that online was made to order for direct marketers. Online represents the ultimate opportunity for CRM and one-to-one marketing. It embodies the ideal interactive medium direct marketers have dreamed about for years.

So what’s the problem? Here’s part of what I wrote to Jeff Brooks in response to his blog (with a few edits).

The productive copywriters in direct marketing and fundraising cut their teeth on direct mail and other traditional media.

Does their hard earned knowledge in traditional media make them obsolete now that online has become the media with tremendous expansion opportunity? Are these proven and experienced direct response copywriters really in the best position to help nonprofits or companies as a whole maximize the power of online marketing?

I think most organizations would say that they would prefer to hire someone with 3-5 years of pure online marketing experience rather than the proven direct response copywriter with 15+ years of experience who has little hands on experience with online marketing.

That seems to represent hiring managers’ typical mindset not only for copywriters, but at one degree or another, they also apply this philosophy to all direct marketing functional areas.

Your take on this?

Over the last 20 years, I’ve done my fair share of direct mail lead generation for the insurance industry.

Most of those mailings were dropped year round to keep the internal telemarketing groups and field agents busy.

There are five major mistakes that most insurance companies make that severely reduce response rates.

1. Insurance companies do not test a large enough variety of lists to win long term.

Once a few lists are found that work, the insurance companies mail only to these names with the mailing going to the same names over and over again. They wear out these names and experience diminishing returns.

Test compiled lists based on customer profiling to refresh your list. Also test response files and aggregated lists to uncover new list categories. Find a good list broker who works with several large insurance company clients to help you find those new names.

If you need large rollout quantities, be sure to test marginal lists that have large rollout potential. After running your merge/purges prior to each mailing, be sure to focus on lists that have a high match rate with your present customer list. Those are the lists that will most likely get your highest response rates.

What other list issues have helped or hurt your program?  

2. Companies do not prepare the sales force for the calls.

Provide the call center with your samples several days before each drop and share the lead generation strategy with your field agents.

This exposure assures buy in from both your internal as well as external sales representatives.

How do you prepare your call center for the calls brought in by mail?

3. Some insurance companies let the lawyers take over the marketing program.

Insurance companies sell policies and policyholders buy claim payment protection.

The creative work provides coverage features, but often fails to sell the company and the claims service experience. The risk of high claims and litigation for insurance companies will never go away. As insurance companies attempt to reduce risks, they have unwittingly allowed their lawyers to emasculate their lead generation programs.

Use testimonials liberally to reinforce positive claims experiences.

Negotiate hard with your legal team to make your mail more responsive to customer needs.

4. Most direct mail formats mailed by health insurance companies are not designed for maximum response.

The format of choice for most insurance companies is the self-mailer.

After hundreds of tests in this industry and others, I have yet to beat the classic envelope containing a letter, response device, and product brochure when tested against a self-mailer or oversized postcard.

What formats have you tested? What format works best for you?

5. The insurance industry is notorious for lack of imagination in testing offers.

You would think that in spite of the state-by-state regulatory environment, insurance companies could find a way to reward respondents who bother to respond.

But frankly, the industry needs to do a better job of offer development.

Except for the list and the product itself, nothing will impact response rates more than the offer.

Have you tested various offers? If so, what offers got the best response in your situation?

This morning I got an automated call that did not make me hang up immediately as usual.

It began by saying something like this:

“Hello, This is a call from your bank offering to lower your present interest rate to 6.9%. This offer is blah, blah, blah.”

I listened for a few more lines expecting them to tell me what bank. Like most of the population, I use several banks. But it was obvious after a few seconds they were not going to answer that all-important question. “Who are you?”

I hung up the phone disgusted.

First of all, I assume that this was a legal call and that I am indeed a customer as they claimed. I am listed on both the national and state “No Call” lists for the number called.

But their refusal to tell me up front who they were completely ignored my need to make a decision as to whether or not I even wanted to listen to the message.

The second issue is that if it was the bank’s desire to reduce my interest rate, instead of sneakily raising it over time without my explicit permission as they have done in the past, then they should simply do so. Then send me a letter explaining how they were treating me like an important customer by voluntarily reducing my rate. What a novelty! Treat me like a customer for a change.

The banking industry really needs to sit back for five minutes and think about the needs of their customers. This industry is plagued by insensitive behavior in its marketing practices.

What experiences have you had with banks showing that they are either in touch with their customers or not?

One of the key differentiators between awareness advertising and direct marketing has to do with behavior change. With awareness, the message creators convey a feeling or attitude toward a given product or service.

For direct response creative teams, the task goes well beyond a good feeling and must elicit a specific action. The ultimate action is to prompt the target audience to buy the product.

This action cannot happen some time in the future. The action must occur immediately for the advertising to work. Simply repeating the same message over again does not work, because the second time, the same appeal generates even less response.

Unlike branding or positioning advertising, the so-called "build effect" does not save the day. Every dollar is trackable and accountable for specific results. The creative work lives or dies by the required results.

How does the creative team write copy that wins business and not just awards? The judge, jury and, in some cases, the executioner is the target audience that receives the message rather than peers or company executives. In fact, the creative team must listen to the voice of its true master --- the target audience.

Now that we have that strait, let’s look at the human behavior characteristics that increase the pulling power of the direct marketing creative professional’s tool kit.

Nancy Harhut, managing director of Hill Holliday Relationship Marketing made an eye-opening presentation at the most recent DMA conference that was recorded in Target Marketing Magazines archives and entitled “Live From DMA 07: Four Ways to Leverage Human Behavior.”
 
1.    People respond to authority figures.

“Social scientists have found that because we don’t have the time to research everything, we’ll defer to someone who appears to be an authority on the subject. Habitat for Humanity leveraged this behavior when it put Rosalynn Carter’s name in the corner card of its fundraising solicitation.”

Sometimes the best authority figures are not the famous, but people just like us who bought and used the product. Testimonials are one of the most underestimated and overlooked power tools available to direct marketing creatives. Use them frequently.

2.    Long copy is more trustworthy.

“According to a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, all things being equal, people are more apt to trust long messages over shorter ones—regardless of the quality of the information or whether they’ve even read it.”

I must admit that this rationale is new to me. MS Harhut further explains that long copy in and of itself implies truthfulness.

In my testing, long copy in ANY channel does out pull shorter copy.

But I think that it is not just the length, but the fact that if the copy supports the product promise and takes the time to explain all of product benefits, there is greater opportunity to sell the interested prospect on responding now.
Longer copy answers all potential questions and objections to enable the purchase.

Remember that in direct response, we are talking primarily to those prospects who are likely to buy now. We loose some who are not interested enough yet to purchase, but we still get that precious 1-3%  for a successful effort.

The more expensive the product and the more considered the decision, the greater the need for lengthy copy.

Many inexperienced online people and direct marketers are swayed into thinking that people are too busy to read anything. My answer to this ---test it thoroughly using A/B splits and compile the evidence as I have before refuting my conclusion that long copy typically out pulls short copy.

3.    The negative can be more compelling than the positive.

“Scientific studies have confirmed that the avoidance of pain can be a more powerful motivator than the achievement of pleasure.”

Isn’t it interesting that the truth often contradicts what the layman considers to be true without evidence?

How many times have you heard a client or manager say “That’s too negative. How can we win over anyone with a negative? Let’s turn that into a positive.”

The author uses this example from the direct response creative world.

“Boardroom Inc. has used this tactic to great success in its long-standing ‘What never to eat on an airplane’ control for Bottom Line/Personal.”

The learning here is not to fear the negative headline. People are driven to avoid loss and pain. Take advantage of this human behavior trait.

4.    People want what they cannot have.

“The psychological reactance theory, identified by psychologist Jack Brehm, states that when something interferes with our previous access to something, we’ll react against that interference by trying to get that thing more than ever. Think ‘Limit of two’ and ‘While supplies last.’”

Note how the iPod caused a frenzy of demand when it was new.(It still carries that cache). The novelty became a necessity. People wanted to follow the crowd for fear of missing an opportunity to own what someone else either had or might get. Customers even waited in line overnight in front of Apple stores to make sure they got one before supplies ran out. They also wanted to show their friends that they had one before others could say the same.

This desire works hand in hand with following leaders and others who buy into an idea, a product or service. If others in big numbers buy this, then it must really be good. I must own one too.

There are other drivers to action. Which ones should we add to this list?

 

Dean Rieck’s superb Direct Creative Blog provides a listing of his practical and FREE articles about how to create winning direct response copy. Go here and survey an even larger list of useful articles.

Here are a few titles to whet your appetite.

- The Second Greatest Offer in the World
- The 7 Persistent Myths of Direct Mail
- The Emotional Appeals That Make People Buy
- How Technology Has Changed Creativity in the Ad Business

There are many more titles.

The best part is that Dean knows what he is talking about and provides solid advice for both copywriters and those of us who manage and evaluate direct marketing creative work. Take a few minutes and check out a couple of his articles. You'll be glad you did.