Sir Speedy Centennial

When you send an email or direct mail to your customer list, do you divide your list into logical groups? If not, you may be missing a great opportunity to understand your customer better and, from that understanding, create messages to which each customer type is more likely to respond.

As an example, let’s take a look at ACME Vitamin Company. They send out an email and postcard offer each week to their entire customer list. It’s typically a discount on a type of vitamins. With each email they send, they have found that about 30% of their customers open the email, about 2% print the enclosed coupon, and only about .03% redeem the coupon. With each postcard, they have found that about 1.7% of their customers go to the custom landing page and print the coupon. The redemption rate is about the same. (How do they know this? They use analytics, of course.)

ACME collected these email addresses from their site’s online sign-up form. On this form, the customer must identify themselves as a male or female. Additionally, they are asked about their address, age, education, employment, and overall fitness. That’s a lot of valuable information.

Armed with this, ACME is sending two different emails and postcards this week: one with a hot, swimsuit babe image directed to the men in their list and another with a hot, underwear model image going to the women in their list. Each of the images seem to promise that if you take this vitamin, that hot guy or gal is going to be dying to meet you. Not surprisingly, their response rates shot straight up!

OK, so that’s a pretty simple example of segmenting your list, but ACME could take this much further. Let’s suppose that they also ask if the women are pregnant or planning to be pregnant. Now they can send a very special message about prenatal vitamins only to the women who would most likely respond to the campaign. The image at the top is now that of a too-cute newborn.

If this same campaign were sent to the entire list — knowing that only 2% of the list are women with babies on their minds — think about how low the response rates would be. It would also be very misleading and ACME might make a decision to drop the prenatal line altogether. In actuality, when the message became targeted, ACME learned that between the two media (print and email) more than 70% of their targeted listed opened the email, 56% printed the coupon, and a whopping 35% redeemed the coupon! Now those are results worth talking about.

Segmenting your list can be really easy, but it will depend on how you collected the list, what information you collected, and what you are promoting. If you’re selling cowboy hats and you have a list with no more information than their address, you would likely see better results from emails and printed material that go into the western states.

So, before you click send, take a moment to review your list and your message. Isn’t it time you hit the target with your marketing? Call Sir Speedy Centennial today (303 799 4383) for a list and campaign review. We’ve been your neighborhood printer for 30 years and now we’re here for your marketing, too.

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