7 Timeless Truths

1. BIRDS OF A FEATHER FLOCK TOGETHER. People with similar demographics flock together. Many “neighbor” mailings, based on this principal, have been very successful.

2. SLOW AND STEADY WINS THE RACE. It’s a continuous and consistent marketing message that wins. The unique and cool don’t make lasting impressions. Working the back-end has always been the key to success in direct marketing. Over and over again.

3. MIND YOUR Ps and Qs. Think about your Promotion, the Product, the Place in the overall market and the Price as part of your offer. And keep asking Questions of your customers and prospects to learn what they like and dislike about your product and price and performance.

4. SEEK AND YOU WILL FIND. Not all data is created equal. It’s not just a matter of constant testing, it’s finding quality data suppliers with a reputation of integrity.

5. THERE IS SAFETY IN NUMBERS. Check the numbers. Don’t be fooled by the front end. The key is in the conversion and the lifetime value of each customer. A higher cost new customer may be worth 100 times that of a low cost customer who only buys from you once, or renews once, or donates once.

6. TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON. Run seasonality tests. Mail a small quantity of your best names, the same offer month after month. Ascertain the difference in response by month. Use this not only to determine mail-dates, but also to enable you to test “off season” and project what the responses will be during your best mailing seasons.

7. MAKE NEW FRIENDS, BUT DON’T FORGET THE OLD. Too many companies focus on customer acquisition. Their back-end becomes automatic, and they spend very little time on it. Companies test dozens of front-end offers, and rarely try new creative approaches to their back-end mailings. In reality all your profits come from back-end mailings, and that deserves as much, if not more, attention than acquisition mailings.

I’m sure you can come up with a dozen more sayings that are applicable to the direct response industry. That includes mail, print, phone, email, websites, etc. If you can think of others, please pass them along. Thanks to Lawrence Kimmel for the inspiration.