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Web
Response - Modern 1:1 Marketing |
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How do you get customers to respond to your offer? Customer response is the hardest single task that any marketer faces. Lets explore the implications of web response – a new technique that may eventually eclipse all others. How Does This Work? In the ideal web response, you ask people reading your catalog, ad or direct mail piece to respond by entering www.yoursite.com which is a special micro-site that is set up just for this promotion, or just for each customer. Using a system that we have set up for several of our clients recently, we send a mail or email promotion to customers giving each one a personal PIN asking them to log on to a micro-site to update their personal profile. When they do, they find a site specially prepared for them. We have already populated it with their name and address, plus whatever else we know about them. The offer that brought them to the site is featured. While there, they can correct their name and address, give us their email address, and complete some survey questions which we may need the answer to – in addition to buying the offered product or getting the promised reward for the visit. We get their permission to retain the information that they have provided to us, and with that permission, we save a cookie on their computer so that when they come back again, they don’t need to enter the PIN. The advantages of web response are many:
Comparison with Other Methods There are really only eight methods: Each method has its advantages and its drawbacks. How can we choose among them? There are three main considerations for judging a response method:
Response Rates In direct marketing a 2% response rate from prospects is usually a good rate, depending on the offer. From customers, response rates are often much higher. If the customers are local, nothing beats having them come in to visit your store to buy the products. Where that is not possible, most companies use mail or phone response. Phone is preferred if the offer justifies the cost. In catalog sales, live operators usually boost the average order size over any of the other methods. GUS, the largest cataloger in the UK typically gets a 20% cross sell rate on live operator calls. That means that when a UK consumer calls in a catalog order, one time out of five, the operator can talk the caller into buying an additional item after she takes the original order. Few of the other response methods can boast this rate of cross-sell success. The offer to pay for the customer’s Fedex and Priority Mail response can be quite impressive. Some marketers, particularly with large donor files, find that they can get double-digit response rates with these two methods. Fax has never been a big method, except in business to business, simply because most consumers don’t have fax machines. The two least costly and fast response methods are email and web response. These cost the company and the customer almost nothing. Both are lagging in the past couple of years because not enough people are on the web from their homes on a regular basis. That is changing fast as we will see later. Cost per Response A phone call to a toll free number can cost you $5 or more, depending on how long your agents have to talk on the phone. Mailed in responses are much cheaper, but they take forever to arrive, get opened, get entered, and get answered. Sometimes more than a month goes by. This is no way to create 1:1 relationships. From this chart, it is clear that email and web response are the least costly methods of hearing from customers. They have one key drawback at present, however. Not enough people are on the web yet. This is changing fast. Before you finish reading this article, over 1,480 additional US households will have come on line – a total of about a half million new households per week. These people are going to have to do something with their Internet connection. Some of them will use it to respond to your promotion. When they do, you have to be ready. Web response is probably your best solution.
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