Reduce Marketing Costs While Increasing Marketing Effectiveness
By Mark Goodwin
VP Sales, Marketing Support Services
With shrinking budgets we have to prove ROI and increase response rates.
What's a marketer to do? Here are 5 tips and recommendations we hear from our partners:
- Transpromo opportunities
What communications are you sending (think invoices or a rebates)
that you could add marketing messages to? Since you are already
paying for postage and labor, are you able to piggyback a marketing
message? This also works for email order confirmations and shipment
confirmations. You can add a marketing message and link back to your
website for incremental orders.
- Leveraging your existing databases
If you have a database of customers, warranty registrants, prospects,
and past customers, are you leveraging this data before buying an
expensive prospect list? It is always less costly to sell to existing
customers than to acquire new ones. Chances are you have a wealth of
data that can be used for personalized, relevant conversations with
your customers. I know of one partner who created a win-back program
for customers who had not purchased in 5 years. Within one month of
sending this data to sales reps in the field they generated 2
million dollars in sales.
- Social Media
The Internet provides excellent ways to interact with your customers
and partners through Linked In, Twitter and Facebook. With these
websites, you can gain additional information for the databases you
are leveraging in tip #2 above.
- Outsource
Focus on your core competency and outsource areas such as telemarketing,
fulfillment, lead management, and database management. Factor in all of
the resources such as production space, employee costs, and benefits that
you may be using in-house for these support functions. Compare these
costs to what an MFSA accredited company proposes. Outsourcing could
have an immediate impact on your bottom line.
- Print on Demand
Printing on demand kills two birds with one stone. You are in compliance
with green marketing efforts, and you REDUCE the costs associated with
the printing and management of your collateral. I know of one company
that saved $300,000.00 in the first year it switched to a print on
demand environment.
I hope these tips helped! Please feel free to share your own tips with me below.
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