Is Direct Mail Dead?

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Donna Kutter

Direct Mail Fulfillment picture - Bulk Mailing House

The internet is buzzing with “the death of direct mail”. Postal services are losing money and many are concluding that traditional direct mail is dead!

Is direct mail really dead?

Absolutely not! Here are 7 reasons Direct Mail is here to stay.

1. Direct Mail Delivers Strong ROI

According to a recent study, the Direct Mail Marketing Association concluded that for every dollar spent on direct mail, it resulted in an average of $12.61 in direct marketing-driven sales.

ROI: Summary of DM-Driven Sales Per $1 of DM Advertising
Return by Medium	2004	2008	2009	2010	2014
Direct Mail	$12.33	$12.55	$12.53	$12.57	$12.61
Direct Mail (Non-Catalog)	$15.59	$15.52	$15.22	$15.28	$15.48
Direct Mail (Catalog)	$7.06	$7.28	$7.32	$7.34	$7.27
Telephone Marketing	$8.49	$8.57	$8.48	$8.42	$8.29
Internet (Non E-Mail)	$25.93	$19.88	$19.83	$19.86	$19.77
Internet Display	$25.53	$19.78	$19.57	$19.57	$19.21
Internet Search	$27.60	$21.84	$21.85	$21.90	$21.93
Social Networking	NA	$12.57	$12.39	$12.45	$13.02
Internet Other	$17.59	$16.62	$16.48	$16.75	$17.03
Commercial E-Mail	$58.01	$44.93	$43.62	$42.08	$36.70
DR Newspaper	$13.26	$12.77	$12.46	$12.26	$11.89
DR TV	$7.02	$6.81	$6.63	$6.62	$6.48
DR Magazine	$10.30	$10.11	$10.27	$10.26	$10.06
DR Radio	$8.66	$8.60	$8.29	$8.28	$8.09
Insert Media	$11.76	$11.60	$11.45	$11.43	$11.35
Other*	$6.93	$7.01	$6.89	$6.91	$6.87

*Other includes all other trackable DM delivered media including outdoor, facsimiles, podcasting, displays, and kiosks.

2. Direct Mail is More Deliverable

Up to 20% of email messages are undeliverable due to anti-spam software an email address changes. Most regular mailing lists guarantee a 95% deliverability rating.

3. Direct Mail is “Sticky”

With email, if a prospect doesn’t like the email at first glance, it is simply deleted. Never to be seen again. With a direct mail piece, it can be put aside for later, it can be passed along to someone else, or it can just hang around to be viewed by multiple prospects. This is especially true with catalogues. Why do you think Avon still distributes catalogues in this digital age? Because they work!

4. Standing out from the Crowd

Because everyone is going digital these days, everyone’s email box is filling up with marketing messages, while, at the same time, the volume of direct mail is down. Some estimates say by 25% in the last two years. Think about that for a minute, a direct mail campaign now has a better chance of standing out from the clutter.

5. Direct Mail Delivers Instant Trust

In today’s digital world and the constant bombardment of internet scams, letters from African billionaires leaving you sums of money, viruses, etc. The consumer is wary of on-line marketing. It takes a lot to build credibility on-line these days. Direct Mail print advertising doesn’t have the same negativity. Most people consider printed matter to be trustworthy and tangible and are more likely to see it being reliable.

6. Direct Mail is B2C Marketing’s Secret Weapon

According to a recent survey conducted by Target Marketing Magazine, the channel that delivered the strongest ROI for customer acquisition for B2C marketers was direct mail. Direct mail also scored highest among marketers for customer contact and retention.

7. You Don’t Need Permission

Unlike email marketing, you don’t need permission. Most email marketing is required to be permission based so that it doesn’t contravene anti-spam laws. With direct mail, you can send a letter to anyone you want to. You don’t need permission. Direct mail is still the number one way of reaching out to an unknown prospect.

So why Don’t More People Use Direct Mail?

Most marketers today don’t have the experience. Direct mail is a tried and true technique that works! However, few young marketers raised in the digital age have experience with direct mail marketing. For direct mail marketing to work, it has to be executed properly. The right list has to be selected; the list is the #1 most important factor in the success of a mailing campaign. The second most important factor is the offer. It needs to be compelling and low risk to the consumer. The third most important factor is the call to action. A carefully worded call to action combined with a compelling offer is critical. Fourthly, the design of the mailer is lower down on the list of importance. So many people without experience in direct mail spend all of their time and budget on designing a glossy, fancy, artistic mailer, with little thought for the offer or call to action or who it should be mailed to. This is one of the critical mistakes inexperience direct mail marketers make.

Dare Marketing has over 15 years of experience with direct mail marketing. Dare has the experience to help you select a list, write, and design your mailer. Also, Dare is a direct mailing house, with a full lettershop, so we have the technology and the expertise to prepare the mailing for you and make sure you are getting economical postage rates.

Dare Marketing also has case studies of how effective direct mail marketing campaigns have been executed with Dare Marketing’s expertise. See Case Studies.

Hidden Secrets to Reducing eCommerce Fulfillment Costs

Posted on April 19, 2013 by Donna Kutter

Fulfillment and shipping costs can add up to be a large part of your costs and eat into your profit. Looking for creative ways to reduce these expenses is critical for your business. There’s a secret to reducing your Fulfillment costs, and that’s kitting.

How Kitting Works for ecommerce

Let’s say you are an on-line vitamin supplier. You sell a wide range of products. Upon analyzing your purchase data, you see that typically, people who order your multi-vitamins also order your Omega 3 capsules and a protein powder. Wow that’s great information on two fronts. One, you can have a special promotion; buy all 3 together and save 10%. This will increase sales. You may even consider offering this on a “daily deal” type website to further boost your sales. Now, here’s where the fulfillment savings come in.

Cost Reductions

Kitting Items Shipped Together:

Let’s say you’re charged 80 cents per item and $2.00 per order. This order would cost you $4.40 cents. Now let’s say you invest some time into special packaging for the 3 items and implement a kitting project, packing them together. Your cost is reduced to $2.80 per order. Some of this will be offset by the cost to kit, but if you have a reasonable volume of items to be kitted, your savings can be significant.

In addition to savings on the pick and pack, you can invest a bit of time in the right packaging that can reduce your UPS/Fedex or Postal Rates. There could be additional savings here as well.

You also may be able to save on the labelling process. If all the orders weigh out exactly the same, your fulfillment house can weigh and label in one step as part of the kitting process, saving you more.

Pre-Kitting Sales Promos:

One final tip is to organize your promotions in advance. Let’s say you are preparing for a “daily deal” type promotion where you are offering your products at a significant discount in limited quantities to attract new customers. You can work with your fulfillment company to pre-kit and pack the shipment in advance and save on picking charges. Plus, your customers will get a faster turn-around as the orders will be pre-packed and ready to go.

Here at Dare Marketing we have creative solutions for your ecommerce fulfillment projects. We’ve been in the business for almost 20 years and can help you grow your business by fulfilling your customer’s needs.

The 5 Biggest Mistakes in Direct Mail Campaigns

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Donna Kutter

1. Not Getting a Professional Copywriter

Direct mail and direct mail copy have been around for decades. Why re-invent the wheel! An experienced copywriter knows the tried and true techniques about how to write to drive conversions. For example:

· Your ad copy should always be written in the third person. It makes the customer feel like you are talking to them.

· Never ask a question in your ad copy. It gives control to the reader. Instead of asking “Need Some Red Shoes?” you should be saying “Elegant Red Shoes Found Here”.

· Keep your copy short and to the point. Don’t use big words. Keep your sentences short too.

· Highlight benefits. Instead of copy like “you’ll bend over backwards for our Red Shoes”, you should be talking about, “the soft soles in our Red Shoes will make walking a dream”

· A call to action. There are so many direct mail campaigns I see without a call to action. You’re sending your customers a mailing piece for a reason. To get them to buy from you! If you don’t tell them what you want them to do, they won’t “contact us” or “check out our website” or “request a free consultation”

2. Not choosing the right contacts to send your mailing to.

If you have a database of thousands of contacts, you can improve your response rate and lower the costs of your direct mailing campaign by selecting the right contacts from your database. For example, you could implement a couple of different scoring systems to prioritize your leads:

· RFM (Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value): this technique involves scoring the lead by how recent they have been in contact with, or contacted you, the frequency of contact, say in the last 12 months, and the monetary value of their purchases.

· Lead Scoring: Lead scoring may incorporate RFM but is much more detailed. You may have identified that your best clients are in a certain geographic area, age, gender, or in the case of business to business marketing, of a certain revenue size, in a particular industry. You assign points based on these factors and rank your database accordingly. If you only have budget to send out 1000 pieces of mail, you’d better choose your top 1000 best bets.

3. The Wrong Creative

The best direct mailing campaigns are simple, highlight the benefits and show the product or service in its ideal state. In the “Red Shoes” example, if you’re showing a picture of anything but Red Shoes, or someone joyfully wearing your Red Shoes, you should consider another design agency. Far too many times ads are created with images that don’t make sense. I’m sure we’ve all see the “I bend over backwards” photo. Or the shark image with a slogan like “we take a bite out of the cost of red shoes”. Don’t confuse your readers. Stick with a simple but elegant image of your product or service.

4. Forgetting about the offer

Every direct mailing campaign needs an offer. The offer sells! Consider, “Call us today and we’ll give you 20% off your Red Shoes Order” or “Buy One Pair of Red Shoes and Get One Pair Absolutely Free”. The offer leads into the call to action. A great offer will get much higher response rates that direct mailing campaigns without an enticing offer.

5. Not Choosing the Right Fulfillment House

A good Fulfillment House with experience in Direct Mail Marketing can save you thousands of dollars. They will have done this many times before. Get their input on design, mailing practices, timing and creative ideas. They can help you with solutions like variable data printing to personalize your mailing. This increases response rates. A good fulfillment house will also have a wide range of services like print on demand, which can save you money for smaller runs. They should also be able to provide you with services to capture your responders. They can fulfil literature requests, mail coupons, send a promo item, or process a rebate. The right fulfillment house can be a single source for all your needs. Choose carefully!

WEConnect “Doing Business Internationally” Winner

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Donna Kutter

Dare Marketing is a member of WEConnect Canada. This week, at their annual conference, I am very thrilled to announce we won the “Doing Business Internationally” award.

Our bilingual call center staff, English and French-speaking, as well as our full service fulfillment capability allowed us to capitalize on meeting the needs of companies outside Canada that have customers in Canada. Through WEConnect, we have been introduced to new prospects, that we have converted to new customers.

WEConnect Canada is a non-profit organization supporting supply chain diversity through delivery of independent international certification for women-owned companies. We are proud to be a certified Women Business Enterprise (WBE) by WEConnect.

Thank you, to everyone at Dare Marketing, and WEConnect!

4 Ways to Improve Order Fulfillment

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Donna Kutter

If you’re a first-time ecommerce business owner or just starting a new online marketing business from scratch, you may not need the end-to-end fulfillment service that we at Dare Marketing offer. We’re ready to work with you when your business is large enough that you no longer feel fulfillment is core to your operation, and you would like to outsource it to a fulfillment house like Dare.

Until that time, we’d like to help you grow your business.

Since optimizing order fulfillment will lead to greater customer satisfaction, we like to share with you a few ways that you can improve your order fulfillment. So we asked Michael Koploy, Analyst at Software Advice (website) and blog manager of Warehouse Management Systems Guide (website) for his thoughts. Michael has recently put together a fulfillment starter’s guide for first-time ecommerce business owners. In the guide, Michael emphasizes that business owners focus on the following:

Establish a Fulfillment Baseline: Start by measuring the metrics that matter most to your fulfillment operation. These metrics will be closely aligned with your customer service creed. For example, if next-day shipping is important to your business, focus on measuring order turnaround time.

Implement Technology to Improve Metrics: Business owners should invest in technology that can help improve the established fulfillment metrics. For example, if orders are getting lost or you’re finding that merchandise is unexpectedly going out of stock, consider investing in an improved barcoding and inventory management solution.

Assign Specialized Fulfillment Experts: Once your operation grows to the point that you need to hire employees specifically to assist with fulfillment, have them specialize in order processing, picking, packing or shipping. This allows them to become experts, improve your operation’s efficiency, and empowers them to find new ways to make their tasks safer, quicker and more accurate.

Know When to Outsource: It’s also important to realize when it’s necessary to ask for the assistance of fulfillment experts. For example, if you believe that your time, resources and team members can be better spent focusing on marketing, customer service and merchandising, you should outsource fulfillment to allow your company to properly grow.

You can obtain more tips for fulfillment by reading Koploy’s guide: The Starter’s Guide to Effective eCommerce Fulfillment.

Do you find this helpful to you? Tell us what you think.

Working Effectively with a Fulfillment House

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Donna Kutter

Over the years, we’ve had many people call or email telling us that they are starting a new company and would like to know how best to work with a fulfillment house.

Here are suggestons for the minimum information we require in order to provide you with a meaningful proposal for fulfillment house services integrated with an online webstore:

How many different items do you want us to handle? Please provide full details including sizes and colours if they are different. Different sizes and/or different colours comprise a different item.
How many orders do you forecast to arrive? We recognize starting a business is a new adventure and this is difficult. Do try and be realistic with these numbers. Perhaps provide a range of what’s likely, what’s your pessimistic scenario, what’s your wildly optimistic scenario?
How many items will be in a typical order?
How much inventory will we have to stock? What we need to understand is how often will this inventory turn over in a year. Are we starting with an inventory that will last 1 year or 5 years?
Also, the order taking program your website is being developed with is very important. Make sure it is a program that will allow a fulfillment house to create a link between your site and our warehouse management system. The orders need to transmit into our order fulfillment system.

If you do not have an online webstore, we can create one for you that will be fully integrated with our order fulfillment system. This online store will have the look and feel of your website, is secure and respects the privacy of your customers.
If you need more information, please feel free to call or email us.

Boost Online Sales: Launch a Canadian Ecommerce Site

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Donna Kutter

Launching an ecommerce website is as involved as starting up a physical store, just different because it’s digital. Gone are the days when you could just post your products and add a few ‘Buy Now’ buttons. To be credible, you have to brand and merchandise your site, showing you’re a going concern and not just a spam site looking to phish private data.

Are you a company based outside Canada and are wondering why Canadians aren’t shopping on your global website? Canadians like to shop in Canadian dollars on Canadian ecommerce sites. If product has to be shipped into Canada, some Canadian shoppers perceive that shipping and delivery can be unpredictable, and they are concerned about possible additional customs fees.

But, you might be thinking, if I set up a warehouse in Canada, it’ll add extra fixed costs, which is a risk I’m not willing to take.

There is an alternative. Outsource your complete ecommerce operation, from order-taking to shipping to invoicing, to a fulfillment house located in Canada. Fewer hassles for you fewer hurdles for your customers.

You can then focus on driving more sales online.

More and more organizations are providing outsourcing solutions. Here at Dare Marketing, we not only handle complete end-to-end online fulfillment logistics for you, we’ll also build your ecommerce website, branded to your corporate look and feel. If you would like to see some examples, just ask us.

Where to Get Logistics Help for Your Growing Online Business

Posted on January 11, 2011 by Donna Kutter

Your online business is growing.
You started your business in your basement, and it is growing fabulously.
You are shipping more and more product but your house is looking less like a house and more like a warehouse.

You’re considering renting office space, complete with warehouse. If this is your first business, you many not know that you have other options.

There is indeed another cost-effective, scalable option.

Outsource your storage, order-taking and shipping. Not only will you get your house back, you’ll also be able to re-allocate your time towards marketing, sales or business development, growing your business even faster.

And you won’t have to rent space for storage.

Who should you outsource to? A ‘fulfillment house’ (like us, Dare Marketing).

What’s a fulfillment house? More than just a shipping service, fulfillment houses are companies that can offer a broad range of e-commerce support services, such as marketing and logistics support.

In the area of inventory and shipping, a fulfillment house can handle the following for you:

Store your products
Receive orders from you, or your site.
Fulfill the order by picking and packing the right products, properly
Ship the order

A fulfillment house can handle more than e-commerce order taking, packing and shipping. Here at Dare we also handle personalized mailings, direct mail and rebate processing management.

You probably don’t need all the services we provide. Tell us about where the stresses are in growing your business, and we’ll give you some ideas on where we may be able to help. Call or email us today. We love solving problems.

Save Money on Direct Mail to the USA

Posted on April 27, 2010 by Donna Kutter

If you’re a Canadian company with customers in the United States, the rising Canadian dollar has probably reduced your Canadian dollar revenue. You’re probably scrutinizing all of your costs looking for every opportunity to save.

If you send more than 200 items per mailing, such as marketing literature, newsletters or catalogues to your customers south of the border, consider the following tips that can help reduce your mailing or direct mail costs.

Can you reduce your postage costs?
Are there ways of bundling, pre-sorting and routing that can reduce your total postage costs? If you are mailing to the USA in lots of 200 or more, there can be a cost savings opportunities available to you.

Can the weight of your direct mail piece be reduced?
Weight counts and choosing a lighter weight of paper stock can be critical. Using a smaller envelope will also reduce weight. Or you might want to redesign from a flyer to a drive-to-website postcard.

Can the size of your direct mail item be optimized for a lower cost?
Perhaps your marketing agency suggested a non-standard size mailer so that your direct mail item would stand out in a pile of mail. Could this be resulting in significant extra cost?

If you send more than 200 items per mailing, savings can quickly add up.

As part of our direct mail and mailing fulfillment services, we regularly discuss cost-saving tactics like these with our customers. Call us today to discuss how you might be able to reduce your direct mail costs.

Donna Kutter
Dare Marketing
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Double Duty: Learn More About Your Buyers With Help From Your Rebate Fulfillment House

Posted on January 12, 2010 by Donna Kutter

Do you ever wonder about the people who buy your products? You can learn a lot about who buys your products by collecting data through a rebate program. You can ask buyers why they bought your product or if there is a new product line that you should consider. Perhaps there’s a need you currently aren’t meeting. Wow! Now you know what to market to your clients.

Here are 5 different things you can find about your customers:

Who they are
Why they bought your product
Where they bought your product
What they think about your product
Which related products are they thinking about buying next.

To collect this data, are you taking advantage of all the services available from your rebate fulfillment house? If you are working with a fulfillment house as part of your rebate fulfillment program, why not have them capture the data for you?

A fulfillment house typically has both the experience and manpower to efficiently capture data and provide it to you in a summarized, easily digestible format. Data capture can be tedious and requires time that may not be easily available in your office.

Why take the time to capture the data? Data not gathered is a lost marketing opportunity. Even just names and addresses can be used as the building blocks for an email newsletter (with permission, of course). A rebate fulfillment program can be designed to ask customers strategic questions such as “How does our product compare with our competitors?”

Build your data capture goals into the design of your rebate fulfillment program. Consult your fulfillment house early, as they may have some ideas on how to make the data capture of your rebate program even more effective.

Do you have comments about rebate management or rebate fulfillment programs? We welcome discussion, so please do comment.