element that all of the previous examples are missing — and it’s an important element — is a time frame. “Time bound” simply means that there needs to be some indication of when the objective is expected to be achieved. By what date or during what time frame? If you start your objective as: “Increase the number of repeat buyers of Product X by 25 percent,” but don’t indicate when that objective should be achieved, at the end of the year when you examine the results and they are only at 20 percent, a team member or the marketing manager could legitimately say, “I was thinking we’d do this by the end of next year!”
Well-developed objectives help you keep your team on track in terms of what the intended outcomes are, so that at the end of the time line you’ve established, two or more independent observers can say “Yes, we did” or “No, we didn’t” achieve this objective.
3.6 Evaluating your objectives
In addition to reviewing each objective and holding it up to the SMART criteria, you should also consider the overall objectives that you’ve established under each of your goals and ask the following questions:
• Will these objectives be sufficient to achieve the identified goal (or goals)?
• Do we have the resources we’ll need to accomplish the objectives?
• Are the time frames we’ve established appropriate for achieving the stated objectives?
4. The Importance of Objectives
We’ve already talked about the importance of well-developed direct mail objectives in terms of allowing you to determine whether or not you’ve achieved success and to ensure that two or more independent observers can reach the same conclusion based on the way the objectives have been stated. That is very important.
Equally if not more important is the role that objectives play in helping to provide a framework or point of reference for all the planning activities and steps that will be undertaken to develop and implement your direct mail campaign. Your objectives will serve as a guide or checkpoint as you create your offer, select lists, develop copy and design, and deploy your campaign. At each point along the way you should ask:
• Does this activity or decision support our stated objective?
• Is this activity or decision likely to help us achieve our stated objective?
If the answers are “no,” the activity should be modified or the decision changed.
Once you have your goals and objectives established, the next step in developing your direct mail campaign is to consider your target audience or audiences. As you’ll see, the more specific and precise you can be about your target audience, the better you’ll be able to make effective list choices (a critical part of direct mail marketing) and create communications aimed at achieving the results you want.
3
Targeting Your Market
Direct mail has many benefits as we’ve already seen. One of them is the ability to target niche market segments that can represent very specific groups of people based on their demographics, psychographics, and even purchasing habits. Even in a mass-media market that has become increasingly segmented, advertisers have significant “waste” in terms of the people they’re reaching with their advertising messages who simply are not interested in what they have to offer. With direct mail — both traditional and email — marketers can be much more precise in targeting consumers who are most likely to be interested in what they have to offer. This presumes, of course, that they have taken the time to seriously and carefully consider who their target audience is.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
Once you thoroughly understand what it is you’re trying to sell, you can turn to the question of who you are trying to sell it to and how best to reach them. Consider these questions:
• Who are you trying to reach?
• When do you want to reach these customers?
• Where do your prospects live?
• How often do you want to reach potential customers?
Direct mail can be used to target both prospects and existing customers in creative ways. The key is to clearly identify the characteristics that potential customers have, based on your own analysis, past purchase history, and any secondary purchasing information you can attain. The following examples demonstrate businesses targeting their markets:
• iSchool Music & Art is an educational music and art school for children and adults in Port Washington and Syosset, Long Island, NY. With a goal of increasing new student enrollment and recognizing that its real target audience was parents of students (many who begin considering educational options for their children when they’re quite young), the school targeted residences in multiple zip codes representing the areas its students typically come from with children aged 3 to 17 years old. “We will typically enroll about 100 new students at each location from each mailing,” the school says.
• Texoma Community Credit Union wanted to generate CDs (Certificates of Deposit, a type of term deposit), and decided to promote a great interest rate on CDs to 2,400 homeowner-investors from a rented list as well as its own existing top depositors. The promotion generated 198 CDs representing $5.31 million in new investments for the credit union.
• Verlo Mattress promoted a ten-day sale through a direct mail effort using postcards that were sent to a list comprised of its own customers who had purchased directly from its stores over the past two years, and customers who had purchased from Verlo Mattress stores that had closed within the past three years but who were near enough to consider shopping at its locations. The result: $56,000 in sales.
When considering who to target, you should ask yourself the following questions:
• Who are you trying to reach? Define your potential customers in terms of both demographic and psychographic characteristics. Demographic characteristics include such things as age, gender, income, education, family status, and occupation. Psychographic characteristics involve lifestyle or attitudes. If you don’t know specifically who you’re trying to reach, you’ll have a very difficult time trying to determine the best list to use, and whether it’s best to reach out through the mail or online media.
• When do you want to reach these customers? If your product is seasonal such as snowboarding equipment, you will not be mailing in mid-July. Be careful, however, not to reach your customers too late. Your goal is to reach the consumer at the time the purchasing decision is made — this is not necessarily the same point at which the purchase is made. You may very well find that you need to begin promoting snowboarding gear in late September or early October.
• Where do your prospects live? Your choice of list will certainly depend on where your prospects live. Perhaps your product has national appeal and you are able to use national lists. However, again, the beauty of direct mail is that it can be precise. You may want to more narrowly segment your audience by region of the country, size of the city, etc. Or, you may be marketing internationally, which expands your options considerably.
