Great Teasers & Other
Direct Response Truths

Direct mail’s copywriting guru, Herschell Gordon Lewis, maintains there are four prime motivators that come into play every time we try to persuade someone to respond to our offer:

• fear
• greed
• guilt
• exclusivity

With those in mind, I read the following envelope teaser copy:

How is it possible that many ­people with
less intelligence, ­ability and ambition
consistently achieve more than you?

That is a rare piece of copy, indeed, for it actually uses all four of Lewis’s prime motivators, in the following order of emphasis:

1. Guilt — Who hasn’t felt at sometime that they weren’t doing all they could to achieve the kind of success they want in life? Can anyone say they have fully tapped their potential?

2. Exclusivity — You’re being told you’re smarter than those others who are making it, others who are less intelligent, able ambitious than you.

3. Greed — If only you could achieve according to your potential, you could have all the things success brings — all the things those other, less capable people have.

4. Fear — You’re losing out. If you don’t do something soon, you’ll never have the success you want. You’ll be a failure!

Now, it’s a golden rule in direct marketing that if you pose a problem, you must also show that you have the answer to it. In this case, a second block of teaser copy states:

Inside: surprising results from a Harvard
experiment shows you how to perform
better... with less effort — and,
achieve your goals... faster!

Well, I admit I’m hooked. I may not order what’s on offer inside the envelope, but I’ve simply got to find out what’s in there. And that’s the whole purpose of the carefully crafted teaser: Get the envelope opened.

All the foregoing was pretty much the result of my first reading of the envelope, which otherwise was a drab #10 manila window, with my name and address showing through.

I’ve looked at the envelope several times since, with a more critical eye. That resulted in one fleeting quibble: perhaps the language is too difficult, with too many abstract nouns (intelligence, ability, ambition) and some awkward punctuation. But then I considered the target: people who feel they are above average.

Whether or not the copywriter set out deliberately to stroke their egos, he or she nonetheless achieves that subtlety by casually throwing in just a few tough words.

They may not seem tough words to you, but with a functional illiteracy rate of 1-in-5, and an average reading comprehension level of grade 6 to 8, they are tough to a majority of North Americans.

The offer was a hassle-free 30 day trial of a set of six cassette tapes. The whole package consisted of an 8-page letter an unusual reply form, a reply envelope and a unique, photocopied testimonial. I’d rate this mailing as highly successful.

PS — How do you feel about your untapped potential?

Show You Know

This was a simple promo -- an e-brochure -- created to publicize winning the 2002 Lotus Award for Best Email Campaign.

Are they talking about your DM
piece around the water cooler?

Let me start by agreeing with three of direct marketing’s demigods:

· David Ogilvy, who said the word “creativity”
should be banned from advertising;

· Lester Wunderman, who said “the only thing
that matters is results”, and

· Herschell Gordon Lewis, who admonishes copywriters
to “get inside the readers’ heads and tell them
something they want to know”.

I’m not necessarily opposed to attempts to inject direct marketing with a little more wit, colour, playfulness or intellectual challenge. What I’m opposed to are those who dismiss direct mail as dull and somehow unworthy simply because it follows certain well-tested guidelines, such as putting a PS at the end of a letter, or stamping the word “URGENT” in rubrics on an envelope.

I’m also amused by the egocentric objections of ‘creatives’ to the notion that lists and offers might be more important than their precious words, witticisms and images. And I’ll warrant that any ‘creative’ who feels that way has never had his or her work tested.

Things testing tells us

Direct marketers know, from testing, that a PS will boost responses. We know, from testing, that ugly or imperfect artwork may out-pull perfection. We know that “overlines” and “Johnson Boxes” and thrice-repeated phone numbers work. We know you can succeed in business without expensively designed, written and produced brochures. We know that a good offer, made to the right person, is the way to get results. And while it is true that a ‘creative’ package may pull more responses than a standard package with the same list and offer, the gain in results may not justify the extra expense.

Ask Reader’s Digest or Publisher’s Clearing House -- who mail tens of millions of pieces a year -- why they don’t send self-mailers instead of envelopes. Their answer will be that, for what they are selling, those formats don’t work. And they know, because they’ve tested.

Push the envelope... cautiously

Yes, there are times when you can ‘push the edge of the envelope’, even turn it inside out, and get great results. And yes, people do want to receive mail that interests them and piques their curiosity. But the only allowable claim to superiority in direct mail is results, and the only way to prove it is by testing. Until then, I’ll continue to follow a few simple guidelines: I’ll indent paragraphs, use subheads and underlining, and try to speak plainly and informally. Instead of talking about myself, I’ll try to talk to the interests of the reader.

Above all I’ll try to remember Herschell’s other rule: In the Age of Skepticism, cleverness for its own sake may well be a liability, rather than an asset.

P.S. It doesn’t matter if they talk about that “great direct mail piece” around the water cooler. It only matters whether or not they respond.

From those wonderful folks
who brought you… YUPPIES!

Computers bring with them the notion that anything some sap with a pencil and paper can do, the computer can do faster, more accurately, and more completely. In marketing, especially direct marketing, they bring something more¾the notion that we can go beyond simple lists of names and addresses to completely identify our target market and link their lifestyles and desires to our products and services.

Database marketing is the general name for such an approach to marketing. A specific tool database marketers use to help them profile and find target markets is geodemographics. That polysyllabic mouthful is the marketing offshoot of GIS -- Geographic Information Systems -- which has long been used by resource companies and various levels of government to understand the nature of the territories they exploit or manage. For example, it’s important for a forest company to know the types of trees and volume of harvestable timber on a tree farm, and it’s important for a municipality to know where various above and below ground services are located.

Geography plus lifestyle.

When geography is linked to information, that’s GIS. When the information is about people and their lifestyles, that’s geodemographics. Dividing people into geographic groups based on lifestyles is called segmentation, or clustering, and is the very heart of geodemographics.

So, how do marketers use geodemographics? What kinds of information does it give them?

Imagine you’re looking at a map of Kelowna. One way of dividing up the city is by Enumeration Areas -- boundaries set by Census Canada, containing some 250 to 400 households. Basic census information about the households in those areas is readily available: average ages, male/female ratio, average incomes, number of children, and more. Stats Canada also conducts a survey of the spending habits of about 20,000 randomly selected households. This Famex survey data is also available to geodemographers, along with other lifestyle information garnered through privately conducted surveys. So you can look at a particular area of Kelowna, and know with some certainty that the people living there are more apt to drive Mazda pickups than BMWs.

Where Yuppies came from.

Geodemographers know that people tend to live in neighbourhoods with other people who are like them -- they tend to cluster. Remember the Young Urban Professionals -- the Yuppies? That was a name used to describe certain lifestyle characteristics in the 1970s. Whether or not it’s still in use, I don’t know. But Generation 5, which distributes MOSAIC segmentation data in Canada, and is a licensed sales agent of Stats Canada, uses such terms as The Moderates, The Spendthrifts, Inner City Elite and Blue Collar Survival to describe different segments of the Canadian Population.

Compusearch Canada Ltd. (which I believe is now part of Mapinfo) and Tetrad Computer Applications Ltd. are Canadian distributors of MapInfo, a software tool used for mapping various demographic and lifestyle databases, including MOSAIC. MapInfo uses different terms, such as Urban Affluent, but the result is basically the same -- to carve up the Canadian population into recognizable groups and subgroups based on lifestyle and other attributes.

This is where the fun really starts.

When you combine all of the lifestyle and demographic information with Canada’s wonderful postal code system, a process called geocoding, you begin to create data files that are of enormous interest and use to marketers because they are so narrowly focused.

Instead of 200 to 400 homes, you’re now looking at as few as 10 or 20. And you can now begin to make very intelligent decisions about which lifestyle segments are most likely to be interested in your RSP offerings, which are more likely to buy travel products, consumer electronics, and so on. Then you can reach these people easily, by mail, or through targeted messages in selected media.

You can also map and segment your own database to find out which groups your best customers or donors are in, and then use that information to go prospecting in similar neighbourhoods. Incidentally, segmentation data is not just available for households, it’s also available now for business and industry -- a major boon for business-to-business marketers.

Finally, by using other analytical techniques you can add transaction information -- recency, frequency and monetary value -- to create a powerful marketing tool that gives you a detailed look at your market, right down to the level of a single postal code. The uses of geodemographics seem almost endless, from selecting sites for new stores, to planning routes for deliveries, managing cellular phone cell sites, or planning householder drops for new pet food samples.

Use it or lose it.

But for all the benefits of geodemographics, it does not yet appear to be in widespread use in Canada. Kirby Allen, general manager for Toronto’s Generation 5 says a lot is done, but at a rudimentary level which does not come near to using the full power of it.

“It’s a very sophisticated tool which many marketers haven’t the time or expertise to use fully. That may not be a bad thing, because it avoids the danger of oversimplifying geodemographics. If you don’t do a proper job of targeting, it’s easy to run your costs up, get poor response rates, and then blame the method. There just aren’t many service providers yet with access to good data in combination with expertise in modeling that data.”

Another source of resistance to geodemographics may come from marketing companies and other suppliers, who might see revenues drop because sophisticated targeting can lead to smaller print runs and more selective media buying.

“There’s some complacency in the Canadian market,” Allen notes, “but there is increasing pressure to change from US service providers who do come up here and use geodemographics.”

David Garratt, an independent marketing consultant based in Vancouver who specializes in geodemographics, agrees that spreading the gospel can be difficult.

“But once people really understand what it can do, you can actually see their expressions change. First they get it. Then they want it.”

Strengths and weaknesses.

Garratt says the main strength of geodemographics is that it helps you organize your customer database by market area, or any other level of geography, right down to the street level -- even a single block.

“You can use it to find out who’s buying what, who’s driving your market. From there, you can use your marketing skills to generate more revenue.”

He says its main weakness is that you still don’t really know many details about the individuals in your target group.

“You have to make assumptions, based on statistical surveys, and sometimes you can assume wrong.”

He notes the example of a non-profit society which found the bulk of its donations came from a group defined as young urban. These are people to whom you would talk differently than to, say, seniors. And yet a further look into their database, this time using age as the search criterion, revealed that fully 38% of the seniors on their database lived in the young urban neighbourhoods. Not knowing that, not bothering to cross-check the data, could have led to them sending out messages that would turn off their loyal seniors.

Geodemographics goes Hollywood.

In an interview, actor, director, producer Warren Beatty bemoaned the fact that bean-counters now run Hollywood and make decisions about what movies to make based on demographics.

“It’s like driving a car by looking in the rear view mirror,” Beatty complained.

“There’s some truth in that,” says Garratt. “You definitely are looking at yesterday’s behaviour. But it’s also true that when you really know the past well, you have a edge in creating structure for the future. Geodemographics gives you a big edge.”

Expensive? Or well worth the cost?

Since geodemographics encompasses both software tools and data sets, you’re looking at quite a bit more cost than a piece of off-the-shelf software from Future Shop. MapInfo costs over $1,000 for the basic software, with a variety of other modules for viewing, mapping and manipulating data that can easily add thousands of dollars more to your cost. On top of those there are various data maps of Canada and other countries, plus geocoding information that can add more thousands dollars more to the cost.

Here are some websites with more information about geodemographics:

http://www.mapinfo.ca/

http://www.generation5.ca/main.html

http://www.cquay.com/

http://tetrad.com

NOTE: This was written several years ago and may be slightly out of date with respect to companies and names. The basic information, however, is as current as the 9 o'clock News.

DM TIPS #1

11 ways to get better results in any market – without raising costs (you may lower them!)

If what follows seems like commonsense, remember that marketing is 90 per cent commonsense. Everything else – database technology, relationship marketing, statistical analysis, and other special tools – sits on that base.

–by John Friesen

1. Stop sending out brochures in your direct mail packages. They cost money, and you’ll get better results if you let people ask for them as a secondary offer. Sending a letter is cheap… and think of the money you’ll save on printing!


2. Now you’ve decided to make your brochure a secondary offer, where’s the best place to do that? In the PS. Studies by the Direct Marketing Association show that, after the salutation, the PS is the most read portion of any sales or marketing letter.


3. Get permission to email your customers and prospects. You should be asking and re-asking for email permission – by phone, mail or on your website – because the cost for repeated email contacts is almost ZERO! Spend your money upfront to get permission, then watch your cost of sales drop.


4. Use email permission as part of a longer term effort to educate your customers and build permission to sell them your products and services.


5. Stop talking at people about products and services. Use your marketing and sales pieces to get inside their heads and talk with them about the things they really want and need. Talking at people is the reason most advertising fails.


6. Make an offer. This should be obvious, but too many mail packages try to sell something instead of making an offer. The offer answers the question “what’s in it for me?” So make your offer prominent, state it clearly, and make it both relevant and compelling. Oh yes, don’t forget to sell the offer!


7. This should also be obvious by now, but create a user friendly Website and then use every opportunity you can – phone, mail, print ads, radio and TV – to drive people to your Website. Make sure that when somebody lands on your homepage they see something they want to see – not just you yakking about yourself. Your website is NOT a brochure!
   


8. The most effective format in print advertising is an arresting (but relevant) picture or photograph, with a benefit-laden headline right below it. The headline acts like a caption for the picture… and everybody, everybody reads captions.
   
   NOTE: Men like pictures of men (surprised?); women like pictures of women; men and women like pictures of infants, small children and animals (dogs and aggressive animals for men; cats, dogs and cute animals for women)
   


9. If you’re running TV spots and you want people to call in, for heaven’s sake put your phone number up early. Make it big and clear and keep it up for at least 20 seconds, right to the end of the spot. Let the designers and art directors complain, but remember, your company can’t live on the awards they want to win.


10. Use specialists and be willing to pay for what they know how to do for you. Then listen to what they have to say.


11. This is the most important tip of all: buy and build good lists for prospecting – you’ll save time and money in the long run. Work your house list hard to build relationships with customers, because the fastest, easiest and least expensive way to build profits is to sell more to existing customers.

John Friesen has over 25 years creating successful direct response marketing in all media, traditional and online. He knows how to get better results from your marketing dollars.

604-812-1332