DMA Response Rate Report 2015 – original article: here. 

Direct mail is over seven times more effective than all digital channels combined, according to the Direct Marketing Association Response Rate Report 2015.

Median direct mail response rates to house-file lists were 3.7 percent, survey respondents reported. Email, social media, paid search, mobile and internet display together tallied only a 0.52 percent median response. Direct mail’s overall prospect-file response rates were 10 times that of email, which came in at just 0.1 percent.

“The report is clear,” said Partner & Chief Marketing Officer Jay Carroll, “in spite of all of the noise about direct mail being a non-relevant channel, it is unquestionably still a potent marketing tool.”

The return on investment in the direct mail channel was between 15 and 17 percent, on par with social media, and topping mobile, paid search and internet display. Email’s median ROI was between 21 and 23 percent.

Direct mail’s median cost per response of $19 was less than half of the cost per acquisition for internet display, which was between $41 and $50. DM’s CPR was competitive with CPA in social media and mobile ads ($16 to $18), while email was $11 to $15. The study did not track CPA for direct mail.

“One of the most interesting takeaways from the study,” said VP of Marketing & Sales Erik Koenig, “was the breakdown of CPR among different mail formats. A lot of marketers get hung up on cost per piece, prematurely ruling out more expensive concepts that turn out to be more viable than many think.”

Dimensional prospect mailings had median response rates of 2.8 percent, beating oversized envelopes (2 percent), letters (1 percent) and postcards (1 percent). CPR was $43 for dimensional mailings, but $105 for oversized, $58 for letters and $59 for postcards.

The study also found that 44 percent of respondents use three or more marketing channels. When that’s the case, those channels are most likely to be email, social media and direct mail.

Eighty-two percent of respondents said they expect their direct mail usage to grow or stay the same in the coming year. Half of respondents reported using direct mail in 2015, higher than social media (34 percent), paid search (30 percent), online display (29 percent), and mobile (5 percent). Email is used by 83 percent of respondents.

So if direct mail is so effective, why is usage down from 79 percent of respondents in 2012 to 50 percent in 2015? The challenge with direct mail, according to the study, is the cost, effort to deploy and the difficulty of tracking it.

“This is consistent with what we often see in the marketplace,” Carroll said. “Many companies have either given up on mail or not tested mail because of a lack of internal resources, a lack of budget or a lack of an effective DM testing method.  It’s in these circumstances where SeQuel can step in and resurrect or launch a successful campaign that will thrive for years.”

To improve your customer’s experience online, consider these three tips.

Don’t make them have to hunt you down.

Online customers can easily get frustrated and give up and leave if they can’t swiftly find a way to contact you with questions about your products or services. Don’t make them scroll all the way to the bottom of your website to finally unearth a dusty contact link in grey, 3 pt. type. Don’t make them navigate away from your product page to the home page in order to find the contact link. Don’t force them to consult a site map to find a contact link either, unless you prefer to be completely unreachable.

Instead, at a minimum, have a clear, large contact us link that shows up on every page of your website, so customers can quickly get answers to impromptu questions.

Take a page from the old print catalogs.

Years ago when print catalogs were in style, customers were given multiple methods to place an order. Buyers could mail it in, phone it in, or fax it in. Do the same for your customers. People have varying favorite ways to place orders. Offer an 800 number as well as an online order form, and perhaps let them order via Live Chat. By doing this, you’ll appeal to a much broader range of customers.

Don’t make them wait.

Don’t make your site visitors wait for splash pages to finish, and don’t make them wait for pages to load. This is akin to making your customers wait outside the shop door while your employees finish their merchandising displays. By the time you open the front door, your customer could be long gone. Your website developer should be able to design a site for you that loads quickly, with web-optimized graphics that won’t hang up your customers’ ISPs. When in doubt, always choose faster download times over razzle dazzle.

If you are like many business people, you may wonder how much time and money you should invest in social media on large networking websites like Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. You might havealready invested in these platforms, but you are not sure that you can measure any tangible results. While it’s nice to see a growing number of fans and followers on your business pages, it would be even nicer to correlate that with an increased number of leads and sales.

Measuring Social Marketing Performance

One of the most difficult things about assessing the benefits of social media efforts is that some important benefits are intangible. For example, brand awareness might be one of the main goals of your campaign, but it can be hard to measure the way that increased awareness has impacted your sales unless you do absolutely nothing else to generate sales and leads.

Information Today is a website mostly aimed at librarians and information gatherers, and they have published some topical insights for business people who need a way to quantify the results of their efforts. They suggest these simple tactics to measure the effectiveness of your campaign:

• Analytics: If your goal is to increase the number of visitors to your website, you should have tracking in place on your site to see where visits originate. If your goal is to get the phone to ring, you can either dedicate a phone number to your efforts or simply train your representatives to ask where the call came from.
• Search results: Spend the time to measure your ranking in popular search engines, and you should do this both before and after a search media campaign.
• Internet mentions: Google Alerts is a great tool to alert you to mentions of your business website or social media page on other Internet properties.

In the glory days of print marketing, advertisers could produce just about anything they wanted and it would attract the desired attention. From listings in newspapers to colorful spots in magazines, some quality artwork and a quick catch phrase often proved all an advertising company needed to prove successful. However, this day is long gone and it has changed drastically over the past decade. Now, the majority of marketing takes place over the Internet as it is easier to target a specific demographic and know exactly what these individuals might want. This does not mean print marketing is dead, but it does mean print marketers have to think differently.

Target Demographic

A print marketer needs to understand now who is more likely to come in contact with their advertisement. If the ad is to appear in a newspaper spread, fewer and fewer young professionals are reading newspapers. This means marketing towards a younger crowd requires more integration with the Internet than ever before. It also means that a print marketing company needs to target specific publications in order to increase the chance of even reaching their younger demographics. Publishing content in smaller newspapers or magazines that target a more focused audience is now more important than spending more money for the major newspaper in the region, as this readership is lower than ever before.

Integration

Integrating other forms of marketing with print is essential, not only to reach the target audience but simply for survival. Without this ability to use the Internet, most marketing companies are going to fold due to the lack of revenue. Marketing is now a progressive, ever evolving game mixed with the growth and development of technology. Without integrating this technology into the marketing platform, the company has very little chance of success.