Posts about customer list

Direct Response Marketing

Patrick Zuluaga- 15 March 2017

A recent presentation on Direct Response Marketing is available at our Marketing Seminar Presentations page.

It is my view and experience that the best marketing technique to drive new business development is direct response marketing!

What is direct response marketing? It is a marketing technique designed to generate immediate business results from a promotional offer.You can read my article about using AIDA (Attract, Interest, Desire, Action) to help you prepare your promotional offer from our many articles at our Marketing Resource Library.

Your promotional marketing message or direct response offer will have the following attributes:

  • Creative - to ensure that your marketing information will stand out from the crowd and draw the recipient to read or view your promotional offer immediately
  • Target Market - is a highly focused and targeted selection of prospective customers for your marketing message offer
  • Content - utilise an emotive personalised and relevant marketing message that will resonant with the recipient, it must have a compelling and powerful offer with a 'call to action' framed with scarcity or a limited time frame to drive the response

Over the years, my clients and I have successfully used direct response marketing techniques using the following communication channels:

  • Postal Mail
  • Email Marketing
  • Social Media
  • Leveraged Personal Selling
  • Cross/Multi-Media

I am interested in hearing from you on your own direct response marketing results, what has your experience been in using direct response marketing techniques?

Please share with us and join the discussion.

Email Marketing - PMZ Marketing

Patrick Zuluaga - 26 February 2014

As an owner of an online business, one of your key strategies should be keeping your clients informed: whether you're launching a new product they might like, an interesting sales campaign or simply telling them what you've been up to. This is where email marketing steps in and helps you deliver that message easy, efficient and fast. 

What is email marketing?

Electronic or email marketing is sending a commercial message to a group of people (usually your client database) using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. Email marketing covers promotional advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, brand awareness and increase sales, push products and services.

Email marketing is usually sent to your segmented lists from your current customer databases. Broadly, the term is usually used to refer to:

  • Sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.
  • Sending email messages with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately.
  • Adding advertisements to email messages sent by other companies to their customers.

How does email marketing work?

  • It's a quick method to communicate your message to qualified leads: your audience, clients, users database etc.
  • Allows you to measure the success of your campaigns through custom reports that reflect open rates, click through and bounce rates.
  • Is targeted because you can advertise the correct product, to the correct audience, at the right time for them. In return email marketing builds satisfaction and trust because your clients will receive exactly what they signed up for/what they need/when they need it.
  • Through a correctly targeted email campaign you can increase your return on investment and build a solid database of recurrent clients/visitors.

Email marketing and PMZ Marketing

There are some great built-in tools that will help you maximize the success of your email marketing campaigns:

Email Marketing - PMZ MarketingYou can send three types of email campaigns, in an automated manner:

  • An individual email campaign - one campaign sent to a custom list
  • An email campaign series - dynamic email campaigns based on an event or visitor interaction with your site. For example, you can choose to trigger the campaign 3 days after the visitor signed up for a newsletter.
  • Recurring email campaigns - you can send the same email campaign on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. And you can also put a campaign on hold when needed, easily.

 

Send email campaign to multiple lists – this will give customers using PMZ Marketing’s email marketing feature more flexibility when managing mailing lists.

Customers can choose to send the campaign to all customers, one or moreexisting mailing lists, or to a new list. In the same time, you canexclude lists or custom reports from final recipients. And the greatthing is that the system will automatically search for contacts presentin multiple lists, remove any duplicates and make sure that eachsubscriber receives the email once.

Email Marketing - PMZ Marketing

Email marketing templates - you can either build your custom templates from scratch or get a head start with our set of cross-client compatible email templates for you and your clients to use. These templates cover a wide range of themes and can be accessed from within your administrative console.

Use email filtering for email campaigns - you will want to filter your lists according to categories to get the best possible results: demographics, geography, activity on the website, product purchases, subscriber validity in the mailing list etc. Using filtering the possibilities are endless, as you can always get more and more granular with your filtering criteria. 

Email Marketing - PMZ MarketingMonitor email campaign performance - Gives you a birds-eye view of your email campaign, including the below reports:

  • Email clients customers used to view the campaign. Example: Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail, mobile phone, and so on. Keep an eye on this metric, and make sure you optimize your campaign content to look great in the most popular clients.
  • Number of customers that opened the email
  • Actions customer took. Example: A customer submitted a form on your site after viewing an email campaign.

Embed dynamic modules inside email campaigns - embed dynamic modules such as blog posts, news items or event bookings from your online web business presence, right inside email newsletters. These modules are then dynamically rendered when the campaign is sent, so the recipient sees the latest content.

Marketing Challenges of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)

Patrick Zuluaga - 29 August 2012

The three of the most common and difficult small business and medium enterprises marketing challenges are:

  • Finding new clients and customers
  • Using engaging marketing messages that generate results
  • Implementing business oriented marketing systems

I have published an article on the Marketing Challenges of Small Business & Medium Enterprises (SME) that provides useful information and tips on how these challenges can be handled.

Many of you that have been in business a number of years will have encountered these challenges and have survived the experience to grow their businesses.  For those of you that have kindly share with us your successes in managing these small business and medium enterprises marketing challenges.

The 5 Step Roadmap to Successful Email Marketing

Patrick Zuluaga - 01 November 2011
Email marketing is one of the most cost effective communications mediums when used properly to add value and build relationships with your recipients. Here are the five steps to follow in building an effective email marketing program:

One: Define your business objective

You need to be absolutely clear about what you want to achieve.

Two: Build your email list

Put a plan in place to start growing your list.

Three: Prepare your message

Plan ahead and spend most ofyour effort on the message you want to get to the recipient and whataction will result from it.  Follow the AIDA guide;attract the Attention of the reader, generate their Interest, create aDesire for the reader to act and provide them with a call to Action.

Four: Test and test again

Test for open rates with different email subject lines andtest click thru rates for different call to actions.  Once you have theemail that best performs send it to your target list.

Five: Measure and track your results

Use your email marketing analysis tools to measure the resultsof your effort versus the objectives you have set for the emailmarketing campaign.

Share with us your views on how you have used email marketing to promote your business - what works and what does not work.

[Read the complete article]

Better Marketing Results with Integrated Multimedia Direct Mail

Patrick Zuluaga - 26 April 2011
What makes direct mail campaigns successful? 
  • Addresses a specific group of people or targeted audience
  • Uses creative to cut-thru the clatter of the mail box
  • Offers a personalised message that communicates a compelling benefit
  • Creates a sense of urgency and excitement with the mail piece
  • Provides a your clear and visible ‘call to action’
Using this structure approach will achieve superior response rates from direct mail campaigns.

How can we  use integrated multimedia to dramatically improve the results from direct mail campaigns? Consider the following factors:
  • Personalise all communications with the recipient across the different media
  • Using several multimedia channels in the promotional campaign
    • Letter, postcard or mailing piece
    • Mobile phones and other smart mobile devices
    • Web landing pages with personalised URL (PURL – define)
    • Email marketing and auto-responders
  • Using a QR image (QR Code define) image to support the ‘call to action’
Essentially, an integrated multimedia direct mail campaign allows a one to one personalised engagement with the recipient.  It has the ability for the recipient to immediately accept the offer or secure additional information with readily available technology such as their mobile phone or access to the Internet.

What is your own experience with integrated multimedia direct mail campaigns? Let's hear from you.

Group discussion on marketing challenges and solutions

Patrick Zuluaga - 17 April 2011
At a recent small networking business group (SBNG) breakfast meeting, we discussed the challenges in marketing and what were their successful experiences in reach out to their target markets.  Here is the list complied from the meeting:
  • Face to Face meetings (Personal Networking & Selling)
  • Understanding exactly who is your target market/customer (targeting potential customers)
  • Using a system to generate a prospecting funnel and manage the conversion process
  • Testing marketing first before bulk roll-out of the campaign
  • Having the right attitude toward communications with your prospective customers - helping instead of selling
  • Target your own customer database using RFM segmentation (define)
  • Market & sell your benefits not features (how) or use an Objectives-Benefits-Features (define) chart
  • Use marketing mediums that your customers use not what you are comfortable with.
What did you think? What is your own experiences with successful marketing?

How to Make your Customer Database your Best Friend

Patrick Zuluaga- 25 October 2010
Many businesses neglect this very valuable asset - your own in-house database. Why? Most think it is too time-consuming to keep updated or simple fail to realize the potential goldmine from using and maintaining their database.

You may have heard of the marketing phrase “Content is King”, however, you may not have heard that the “Database is Queen”!

Your database must be viewed as a valuable resource asset. It is a potent source for marketing intelligence and a powerful tool for building relevance while nurturing relationships.

To make the most from your database you must be able to answer these five questions:
  1. What is your database objective?
  2. What information is available?
  3. How can the information be captured?
  4. How can you use the information?
  5. What is the best way to segment your database?
What do you think? Have any of you taken the time to segment your database to achieve better marketing results?

View my presentation titled "Why your database should be your best friend" at the recent Email Marketing Summit Australia EMSA 2010 held at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney.

Use your Customer List for Better Marketing Results

Patrick Zuluaga- 24 May 2010
Many businesses focus all their marketing efforts in generating new customer leads while at the same time neglecting the potential gold mine that exist with their current customers! Your promotional marketing plan should always include targeting your most desirable customers with relevant and timely offers.

To identify your most desirable customers I recommend you utilise the Recency-Frequency-Monetary (RFM) segmentation method.

The RFM segmentation analysis method will identify your most desirable customers from your current customers using three different lists, namely;
  1. Recency – to determine the time frame of orders from the date of your analysis. Your generated list must sort by the most recent orders first as your priority target.
  2. Frequency – to determine the number of orders that customers placed with your business. Your generated list must sort by the most number of individual order transactions in descending order.
  3. Monetary – to determine the total monetary value of orders placed on your business by your customers. Your generated list must sort from the highest total value to the lowest total order value.
Next, from these three lists select the top 20% in each of these lists.  These will represent your most desirable customers who are potentially most inclined to act on a relevant and compelling offer from your business.

Let us know what results you have achieved!
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