Why don’t more companies mail to the Hispanic market? It’s a Catch-22, says Rich Mercado, senior account manager at Madison Direct Marketing.
“They’re afraid that [Hispanics] don’t buy by mail,” he says. “The reason they don’t buy by mail is that we don’t mail them. We haven’t gotten Hispanics used to buying by mail.”
“I would say that the biggest misconception about the Hispanic market is that we don’t respond to direct marketing, that we don’t buy that way,” says Beatriz Mallory, CEO and chief strategist of New York agency HispanAmérica. “But there’s plenty of evidence that we do. There’s client-based experience — [companies] like GE Consumer Finance have entire Hispanic marketing divisions set up to support [the] areas of their business [that] market direct to consumers.”
There currently are more than 40 million Hispanics in the United States. By 2020, that number is projected to grow to 70 million — 21% of the country’s total population. That’s a sizable audience by any standards. Still, many companies are hesitant to mount mailing campaigns to this market.
A big part of the problem is several outdated notions that are hard to dispel. For years, says Mercado, the language barrier was a problem. Talking the Talk
“We were afraid to communicate with them in English because we knew that a percentage of them spoke and read Spanish. And we didn’t want to convert [the text] — we felt that converting to the language would be too difficult, or that we wouldn’t do it right,” he notes.
Translation is indeed an important concern, says Mallory.
“Translated copy is very often done by highly educated professor types who churn out translations that are very intellectually demanding,” she says. “Direct mail is supposed to be about getting that message across and getting [prospects] to the phone. To do that, you’ve got to write copy for the market that’s culturally relevant and that doesn’t exceed sixth-grade writing level, depending on what you’re selling, of course.”
Mallory notes that Rodale’s book programs are an example of a company that traditionally excelled at this. “The direct mail is written at the same educational level as the book. So if you’re comfortable reading the piece and reading about the book, you’ll be comfortable reading the book [itself]. That sounds pretty simplistic, but when you do that in English and then hand it to a translator, invariably it ends up being more obtuse than if it were written for the culture from scratch.”
For acquisition mailings, Mallory says she strongly encourages clients to go bilingual. “For a multigenerational household with different levels of comfort with [English], we don’t want to presume we know what language that household wants to respond in.”
For retention and CRM efforts — such as patient relationship mailings in the pharmaceutical sector — Mallory pushes clients to capture and maintain language preference data, and then mail in that language.
Even if Spanish is not their language of choice, Hispanics generally appreciate bilingual mailings, says Mercado. “They’re proud of their heritage. They feel comfortable if they’re being acknowledged in Spanish on one side of the promotion, and then they turn it over and read it in English.”
“Clarity is key” in copy to this market, says Pamela Kimmerling-Hoveling, partner and managing director at RK Hispànica Direct, a New York agency. “Explanations of commitments, offers and legal copy need to be very well spelled out. Also, all customer support needs to be in culture and in language. If you are going to promote to Hispanics, you must support in Spanish.”
The best mailings for the market are created in the language and culture, continues Kimmerling-Hoveling. “Even if you are taking a control package and using it as the basis for the Spanish-language promotion, there always needs to be a culturally relevant tone. Without that, the piece comes off as translated and will not be received [well]. They will see through it immediately.”
Images in direct mail pieces should accurately reflect the target audience, and the Hispanic market is no exception. Mallory notes that her agency is working with a manufacturer that plans to do some direct marketing. “They tend to photograph their product in very patrician, New England kinds of settings. Our consumer doesn’t live in those kinds of places,” she says. “We have to re-stage and re-shoot everything, because the imagery overall is wrong. We are less likely to have pets. We’re more likely to live in urban settings as opposed to rural or suburban tracts.”
But the biggest issue is the portrayal of the family unit, she says, adding that the average number of family members living in a Hispanic home is often larger, and multigenerational.
“Mom and dad and one kid is rare, two are more likely, three are in the realm of possibility and even more,” Mallory notes. “As the Hispanic marketing industry has gotten more robust, there’s a lot of backlash to the idea that you should have a grandma in the picture. It’s becoming a bit of a creative cliché — but direct marketers haven’t even gone there yet.”
Stamford, CT-based Madison manages two Hispanic mailing co-ops, the Direct Values Verizon telephone directory ride-along program and the FamilyAdvantage young family program. Scholastic’s Grolier division and Book-of-the-Month Club both offer bilingual pieces in the co-ops. “Many of the Hispanic marketers have acknowledged that a certain percent of Hispanics don’t read or write Spanish but [that’s what] their nationality is,” says Mercado. “Their [families] migrated here and they’re third or fourth generation. They think in English if they’re younger, because they were born and raised here.”
However, many of the offers in the programs are only in English, acknowledges Mercado. “Bilingual or Spanish-only pieces in the mail are the minority. We have another group of mailers that will absolutely not mail to Hispanics. They don’t feel it’s worth it.”
For the Verizon program, the phone company compiled the list as people registered for phone service. Names are passed through surname tables to make sure the person is of Hispanic origin. “And they do some surveying, but not a lot. There are privacy issues,” says Mercado. “They also know the areas where the Hispanics [predominantly] live, so in those ZIPs — in Miami, for example, there’s a largely Cuban population — it’s very easy. And of course, when Hispanics are asked, they’re very glad to tell you where they’re from.”
In the Madison program, which mails five times a year, names have been acquired from various lists. “Our target was specifically Hispanics who spoke Spanish. That was a very important factor for us,” he adds.
Mailers do have to be careful when using surname tables to identify people of a specific nationality, Mercado notes. “In Nicaragua, Nelson is a big name. Of course, if you look that up on a table, it would never qualify. Somebody once told me in another Latin American country Murphy was a big name — figure that one out. Bernie Williams, who plays for the New York Yankees, is Puerto Rican and reads and writes Spanish better than I do. You have to be a little careful.”
In the past, mailers were hesitant to target the Hispanic market for fear the audience wasn’t affluent enough or didn’t have credit. “That has changed dramatically,” says Mercado. “Hispanics who are second, third, fourth generation in the United States are educated. They have mainstreamed themselves, so they fall into the same economic conditions as the rest of the country.”
“I don’t mean to sound sarcastic, but it’s hard to learn to buy by catalog if you never get one,” says Mallory, noting that not only is there buying power in the Hispanic market but interest as well. Hispanics spend more than average consumers in many product categories, such as jewelry, furniture and electronics — the latter because they like to buy things to entertain their larger families.
Credit card penetration is not as high as in the general market, says Kimmerling-Hoveling, but it’s growing. “Once [Hispanics] have confidence that the mailer is reliable, they will use the card for payment, [but] the culture is used to working with cash.”
She also dispels the notion that Hispanics don’t have disposable income. “They may have less than the general market, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have anything extra to spend.” Also, she adds, the fact that households are multigenerational can work to a marketer’s advantage. “Living in the same dwelling saves costs on separate housing because they pool their resources. So there’s cash there, too.” Sector Challenges
Even if mailers get the copy and creative on track, there still are cultural hurdles. For example, take the financial market. Many of that sector’s marketers focus considerable resources on the Hispanic community. Bank of America reports that about a third of all the company’s new checking accounts came from Hispanic consumers last year. And of the 175 new banking centers the bank opened last year, at least 80 were in communities where Hispanics make up 10% or more of the population.
“Particularly when you talk about mortgages, we’re the fastest growing group of new home purchasers,” says Mallory, noting that Fannie Mae has a robust Spanish-language site and is going as far as supporting lenders it finances in its attempts to market to the sector.
But Hispanics aren’t necessarily running to the phone the minute they get an enticing offer about refinancing. “For the Hispanic consumer today, the process of getting their first mortgage is so onerous and so stressful and horrible, they don’t want to go through it again, and they don’t give a hoot if they can drop their interest rate or whatever the case may be,” notes Mallory. “It’s a struggle to read all these documents in a language they don’t understand, and going through the process of having their credit examined, especially if they’re an immigrant or someone who really hasn’t had a lot of credit experience.”
Thirty percent of all Hispanic consumers believe they automatically will be disqualified because they’re Hispanic, she says. “There is absolutely no trust of lenders, so when a mailer says, ‘Let me translate this promotion into Spanish and mail it out to a Hispanic list,’ there’s a giant cultural gulf that they’re missing.”
To place an order, Hispanics typically will still pick up the phone, because they prefer talking to a live human being. But in the pharmaceutical sector, the Web is fast becoming a popular information channel, says Mallory.
“If there’s a Spanish-language Web site we’ll go to it, because we have really deep questions that generally we can’t get answered as fluidly as we’d like to in the medical community,” she says. “We’re still talking about maybe 4% of physicians in this country being Hispanic, so maybe half actually speak the language. When a DR [piece] says ‘Ask your doctor if this product is right for you,’ 99% of the time we won’t be asking a doctor. Maybe a nurse or even the receptionist or medical translator in the doctor’s office, or our 14-year-old child, who will ask the doctor and translate back to us.”
Direct marketing to the Hispanic market has moved out of the embryonic stage, but it’s still in its infancy, says Kimmerling-Hoveling. “We are pioneers compared with the general market, but there’s so much room for growth. I just wish more marketers had more vision — and the guts to get going with the market!” Hispanics Buy Direct
Respondents to a recent Direct Marketing Association survey of Hispanic DM shoppers reported that they use several DM channels. Direct mail 38.2% DRTV 28.4% Online 26.0% Telemarketing 7.4% Source: DMA 2005 Hispanic Market Report Hispanic Market by the Numbers
*
More Hispanic direct buyers (53%) were not born in the United States. However, the majority (60%) of those not U.S.-born have lived here for 10 years or more. *
Seventy-seven percent of non-buyers weren’t born in the United States. Like direct customers, the majority of non-buyers (56%) have been in this country for at least 10 years. *
Most Hispanic donors to nonprofits (65%) were not born in the United States. *
Eighty-two percent made a purchase through a Web site in the past year, with 62% making five or fewer purchases. An additional 36% made six or more. *
Fifteen percent bought by e-mail in the past year, an average of 5.4 purchases. *
One or two purchases were made by phone in the past year by 57% of respondents. *
DRTV purchases were reported by 42% of respondents. *
More than four in 10 Hispanics cited “convenience of shopping from home” as a reason for buying direct. Of the respondents who did not use the direct channel, 37% said they preferred to “see and touch” items before buying, and 21% said they “weren’t interested” in the advertised items.
Source: DMA 2005 Hispanic Market Report
Network
