Have you ever sent out a mass mail-out and not had the response you hoped for? You sweated over the creative, got the offer together, stuffed envelopes or sent lots of emails and/or FAXes. And then… nothing!
You wonder what went wrong and came to the common conclusion that “direct mail doesn’t work”.
And that couldn’t be further from the truth.
There is a fundamental principle behind any marketing and sales activity.
You have to get the right message to the right person at the right time. Get the first two wrong and you’re dead in the water. The third (the right time) is overcome by continually being in touch, so when the time is right, they take action.
Had a classic example of this the other day.
A colleague of ours rents out data capture devices to exhibitors at trade shows. If you’ve ever been to a show you’ll know what I mean. These devices scan your details from your name badge and put them into a database for the exhibitor. So when exhibitors get busy they know they’ll have accurate details and notes about their leads.
The company deals with exhibition organisers around the world – and is very successful at what they do.
But we wanted to see if we could increase the rentals.
So we did a test case.
I wrote a marketing piece which spoke to the benefits of why exhibitors should be capturing accurate prospect data and how these devices would help.
The letter was aimed at people responsible for getting a good Return on Investment (ROI) on the show – so marketing and sales management.
The letters were sent out as an email with a follow up fax.
And nothing. No extra sales.
Our colleague was shocked. They all liked the material and thought it would do well. So what went wrong?
Well, it could be a number of things.
Exhibition organisers only allow our colleague to contact prospects three times in total. And that could be a combination of phone, direct mail, email, SMS or FAX. Their reasoning (and it’s quite valid in their eyes) is they don’t want exhibitors to get inundated with offers from hundreds of suppliers.
However, if you’re a reader of this newsletter you’ll know that it often takes multiple touches to (between 5 and 9 or more) to educate a prospect and get them over the line.
So three touches may not be enough.
But there’s another factor which could be even more important. The recipient of the communication.
My colleague gets a list of exhibitors with a contact name. However, there’s no guarantee that that person has any responsibility for the overall success of the show and getting a good ROI.
More often than not, they’ll be the boss’s PA or a marketing co-ordinator. You’ll almost never see the sales director being the contact.
And the result? A bad message to market match. It may be the right message, simply being sent to the wrong person. Someone who simply doesn’t understand the importance of accurate data capture. So it gets binned.
End result, you don’t get the sales you thought you would.
So what’s the solution?
You have a couple of options.
One is to try and find the right person to talk to. And that takes time and money, especially if you have 500 exhibitors per exhibition and you do hundreds of exhibitions per year.
However, we know that you can improve the effectiveness of any mail-out by following up with a phone call. Then at least you can impress on the person the necessity for good lead capture and find out the name of the person in charge and speak to them.
And if you can’t call everyone, 80-20 rule applies. Find the 20% of larger exhibitors (one way would be to look at stand size) and target them.
And another option (not an either/or), is to encourage the “contact” to pass the material on to the right person. They are the gatekeeper, so you need show them the benefits of passing the material on. Benefits to themselves (they look good by being on top of things, helping get a better ROI etc.)
And finally, and most importantly, get them to “opt-in” to receiving more information. That way you have permission to keep talking to them no matter what the exhibition organiser’s rules are.
How would you do this? You could offer some free material on how they could get a better return on their trade show investment – a white paper or DVD or free course on how to behave on the stand. As a matter of fact, I’ve got some you can download here!
Then just keep following them up – again and again and again.
Rashid.
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