Go Figure: Unlikely Methods for Direct Marketing Success

There's a lot about direct marketing that doesn't make sense.

For example, if you ask seasoned general marketers to identify the most important element of a marketing communications campaign, most will say it's the creative idea. But talk to direct marketers and they'll swear creative is least important, coming in third behind target audience and offer, which combined represent as much as 80% of a campaign's impact.

Another example: The technology research firm Aberdeen Group recently reported that 65% of marketers segment customers based on demographic characteristics. I'm not surprised. When I ask my students at Columbia about the relative importance of demographic vs. behavioral data, they invariably vote for demographic. But if you ask a DMer, the answer will be that behavioral data beats demographic every time.

The thing about direct marketing is that it doesn't have to be logical. Or, as the great agency head Bob Hacker used to say, “Direct marketing doesn't need to make sense. It just needs to make money.” And, thanks to its measurability, it does.

But I've always enjoyed finding counterintuitive angles in direct marketing. Those things that really don't make sense but just happen to work in the marketplace. So I've been keeping a list of these wacky principles, which I present here for your enjoyment and edification.

Before we review the list, you might be asking yourself, “How does someone learn these things? Where do I find them?” For me, the answer is twofold. First you gain experience through trial and error. You experiment, you test and you learn. Then you read books and articles. Fortunately, DMers tend to share information generously, so most of this stuff is available in print for the taking. These principles may be a little crazy, but they're nothing new.

AND THEY ARE… Copy trumps art

Talk to any creative pro and he or she will claim that design is where it's at in advertising. And that may be so. Certainly in broadcast advertising, visuals and music are critically important. When your ad is intended to be memorable, to tug at the heartstrings and be judged on emotional appeal and recall, then the art may very well be the driver of success.

But when the ad's intent is to motivate a response, then it's about selling, persuasion and the call to action. Those appeals are delivered in words and sentences.

This is why the great direct response creative directors, the hall-of-famers, are all from the copy side. Art directors are their partners, but the copywriters rule the roost. So DMers pay maximum attention to their copy, and they think about art second.

Choice depresses response

Yes, consumers love choice. Why else would our supermarkets be crammed with a seemingly endless variety of brands at different prices?

So when we craft an offer, it's logical to believe that it's a great idea to invite respondents to select the option they prefer. “Free! Your choice of a jaunty baseball cap or this lovable T-shirt!” You might think an offer like this seems generous. It's empowering. It appeals to a wider audience than if the cap or shirt were offered alone.

But no. We DMers know better. We've seen it a thousand times. When you ask consumers to choose — to take the time to make a selection, to put some effort into the decision, to give it some thought — you lose. The no-choice, take-it-or-leave-it offer will pull better. Why? It's easier to react to, it takes advantage of impulse, and it's less likely to be put aside for later.

I met a sales promotion expert recently who said it's a well-known rule in consumer packaged goods that if two ads appear in a Sunday newspaper supplement — one with a single coupon and another with three — the lone coupon will be redeemed far more often. It makes you wonder.

Now, there are some exceptions to this rule, to be sure. I started my career at Book-of-the-Month Club, where the standard offer for all the negative-option clubs was a variation on “three books, three bucks.” Respondents were given 50 or more titles from which to choose their three favorites. Given this rule about choice, the offer sounds all wrong. But in a general-interest book club, the wide variety of titles was essential.

One thing we learned was the more books included in the offer, the higher the response. Odd, isn't it? You'd expect that making people choose among scads of books would be less productive than narrowing the choice for them.

On the other hand, when I was in charge of member acquisition for the special-interest book clubs, we made great use of a take-it-or-leave-it offer: Top-pulling titles in both the business and sailing book clubs would be bundled into a set of three or four books, and that set would beat the control. Go figure.

Get in bed with your competition

What marketer wouldn't love to get his hands on a list of a competitor's customers? But the typical list owner won't allow competitive requests, and often won't even place the file on the rental market. “My customer base is my most valuable asset,” they say. “I must protect it at all costs.” That's obvious. But here's what's not: Mail order marketers found out years ago that by exchanging lists, both parties actually were better off. A rising tide floats all boats, so to speak.

The argument underlying this apparent paradox is that no one “owns” the mailbox. We don't have exclusive access to our customers. They're buying from all sorts of places. (In fact, the ones who buy from the most places are the most valuable.) If they're buying from us, they're likely buying from our competitors. Which means we both might as well grant each other the high return on investment that results from lists with high affinity.

Here's an interesting corollary rule: When you test several new lists, the first thing to do after the merge/purge is to look at the duplication rates of the test lists to your house file. If you see a high dupe factor, your first instinct is to be disappointed. “Hey, I paid a lot for these names, and now I find I already owned a bunch of them. What a waste!” But wait. The high-dupe lists are the very ones that will perform best for you. In fact, they're golden. This is because they have the highest natural affinity to your product or service.

Recency rules

I've heard marketers say they're giving their recent responders a rest on the theory that these customers have already bought what they need, or they've made their donation, and we shouldn't hit them again for a while. Sounds logical.

But ask nonprofit mailers and they'll tell you it's the donors who just sent in their checks who're the most likely to respond right now to another appeal. And a mail order merchant will generate his highest response rates from a recency select.

It's the darndest thing. But as KnowledgeBase Marketing's vice president/solutions architect Arthur Hughes explains, it's like the corner grocer who knows that the customer who came in yesterday is much more likely to come in today than someone who hasn't stopped by the shop in ages.

A similar thought relating to lists: You'd think a target audience with high affinity is ideal. So if you're selling memberships in a cookbook club, wouldn't a list of cooking school attendees be great prospects? Nope.

I learned this lesson at my first DM job, managing member acquisition for the Cooking & Crafts Club. I was shocked to find that buyers from a women's apparel catalog performed better than cooking school grads. The willingness to shop by mail was more important than an interest in cooking. There's just no logic to it.

Catching the eye is different than selling

It goes without saying that you understand the importance of grabbing customer attention before you can make a sale. But once you've successfully motivated people to read your copy and hear your sales pitch, it's best to lay off the attention-getting tactics.

At that point in the process it's all about your ability to communicate clearly. So, if you look at the principles of typography proposed by Colin Wheildon in his masterful book “Type & Layout,” you'll find all kinds of counterintuitive nuggets:

• Bold type is less legible than standard type. Doesn't make sense (bold is bold, right?), but it's true.

• Red type (or any color other than black) is harder to read in body copy. Hmmm. But red is so dramatic. Who'd have thought?

• Old-fashioned serif type (the kind with little “feet”) is easier to read than clean, modern sans-serif typefaces. To the great disappointment of designers.

I've been fascinated that some of these principles have found their way into academic literature, resulting in books like “Predictably Irrational,” by Duke behavioral economist Dan Ariely, and “Gut Feelings,” by German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, which confirm through experimentation many of the counterintuitive ways consumers behave.

As I said, direct marketing may not make much sense. But it certainly keeps us interested.

Have some counterintuitive DM favorites of your own? Please drop me a note at ruth@ruthstevens.com.

---

RUTH P. STEVENS (ruth@ruthstevens.com) consults on customer acquisition and retention, and teaches marketing to graduate students at Columbia Business School. She is the author of “The DMA Lead Generation Handbook” and “Trade Show and Event Marketing.”