Recession: Your Marketing Opportunity

Take advantage of the economy – by doing more marketing while your competitors are riding out the storm. Here are a few things to consider:

1. Maintaining your marketing expenditures during a recession will enable you to capture new business. A recent American Association of Advertising Agencies study documents a strong correlation between sustained spending and increased market share.
2. Consumers don’t go away during a recession, they grow more conservative. This is an opportunity for you to encourage brand switching to safer and cost-saving alternatives.
3. PIMS (Profit Impact of Market Strategy), developed by the Strategic Planning Institute, compared hundreds of companies’ marketing spend during recessions to share and profit gains during recovery. They found that those that spent in recession did far better AFTERWARD than those that significantly cut or eliminated spending.
4. Cuts in marketing investments during a recession have a cumulative negative impact on the long-term value of a brand.

LKCS has a lot of tools that we can put to work for you. From targeted direct mail campaigns to e-marketing solutions, statement marketing/transpromo and branch merchandising, we can help you get the most effective use out of your marketing spend.

Doing More with Less in 2009

What does that mean? We keep hearing about doing more with less. At LKCS, we believes showing a return on all marketing and advertising costs.

What LKCS thinks about 2009:

• Superfluous spending will be eliminated.
• Online channels will be leveraged to support account-holder acquisition/retention efforts.
• Marketers will focus on metrics that measure and drive business.
• Marketers need to validate ROI.
• Analytics and database marketing will increase in importance.
• Marketing campaign metrics will be created and tracked to measure/demonstrate effectiveness, justify marketing spend, improve allocation of resources/expenses.

We also know that many of our clients lack the technology and resources to measure data. Many also have trouble accessing, gathering and analyzing the data to report on the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

Without this type of measurement, marketing budgets are being cut. The result is that some clients are doing less marketing and experiencing declines in business at a time when they should be doing more marketing to grow in a struggling economy.

The tools we offer:

• DataFlex – this database marketing system was designed to identify marketing and cross-sell opportunities, launch new marketing campaigns, AND measure the results of each campaign.
• E-Mail Marketing - Reach out to prospects that rely on the internet for communication. Measure the effectiveness of each and every e-mail you send. Follow-up to those that show interest in your campaigns be reading your messages and clicking on links.
• PURLs – Bring direct mail and the internet together by delivering personalized landing pages to direct mail recipients. Track each and every prospect while learning more about their individual needs.
• Transpromo and Statement Marketing - Reduce your costs by incorporating onserts and target messages directly on your statements, notices and invoices.
• Web Site Development - Spruce up your web site. Get it up to date. Make it easy to manage. Enhance the functionality. Optimize for search engines.

PURLs Without the Oyster

Personalized URLs (PURLs) provide a terrific method to join traditional direct mail campaigns with online marketing campaigns. PURLs provide each prospect with a unique web address such as yourname.mycampaign.com. By driving direct mail recipients to personalized web pages and microsites, PURLs provide an unparalleled ability to effectively measure the response of direct mail campaigns with a cross-media campaign.

Consider the following:

• According to the DMA, 42% of direct mail respondents PREFER to respond ONLINE.
• 25% of direct mail recipients will ONLY respond online. These people won’t call or visit in person.

By utilizing PURLs, your direct mail campaigns will instantly appeal to this “online” demographic. PURL response rates are 3-5 times higher than traditional direct mail response. As Dale Carnegie puts it, “A person’s name is the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” People can’t resist visiting a web page with their name or business name in the URL.

PURLs also provide advanced reporting and automation tools. Not only can you identify each and every person that visited their PURL site (and capture all form responses from that site), but you can also trigger e-mail contacts based on their activity on the site. Combine this type of automation with an intelligent mail barcode and you can invite a prospect by e-mail to visit their PURL microsite one day after they receive the mail piece. Get twice the bang for your marketing dollar.

Statement Marketing and TransPromo Statistics

LKCS has been implementing statement marketing solutions for the past several years. We currently have the ability to incorporate targeted statement ads (onserts), personalized messages, and even Personalized URLs (PURLs) in our statements. The current industry buzz words referring to what we are doing are “TransPromo” and “Transpromotional Documents”. These terms both refer to statements or bills that include marketing as part of the document.

A prospective client recently asked for the ROI on statements. During my research, I accumulated the following statistics relating to statement marketing:

• According to a US Postal Service survey, “95% of customers open their monthly statements at least once, and the average consumer spends up to three minutes reading” the statement. (Deliver Magazine – July 2008)
• “No doubt, a transactional document is valuable real estate for promotional content…proving that a more expansive approach enables firms to further increase marketing ROI and deepen customer relationships.” (Graphic Arts Monthly – April 2008)
• “Some 64% of respondents to a recent survey by Zoomerang and InfoPrint said they would use personalized coupons if printed onto monthly bills and statements (with nearly half responding that these would encourage brand loyalty). But a staggering 86% of consumers said they have never purchased a product or service after receiving a separate promotional document [i.e. statement insert] with their monthly statements. Four in 10 mentioned that inserts accompanying their monthly statements are ‘always impersonal and irrelevant’.” (Graphic Arts Monthly – April 2008)
• “While customers may be inundated with as many as 3,000 advertising messages a day, the average consumer will receive fewer than 12 transaction mailings (i.e. bills and statements) in a month.” (Mailing Systems Technology – March/April 2008)

Based on these statistics, there must be a significant boost in ROI when comparing “traditional” statements with LKCS’ statement marketing solutions.