Yesterday, I tried direct marketing in the raw. For various reasons, we wanted to contact one guy, very senior in a major global corporation. We knew where he lived, and where he worked, but the challenge was to find a way to introduce ourselves, and to encourage him to give us half an hour of his time.
Not a large prospect pool really, but highly targeted.
For once, the data aspect was pretty easy. The challenge was a creative one. My role in proceedings was to hit the internet and find an angle. I had a name, and Google did the rest.
Come on, you have all done it, haven’t you? Searching yourself is an exquisite torture. In five minutes, I knew where this gentleman was born, where he went to school and university, what degree he got, post graduate qualifications and a full career biography. A couple of more clicks, and I had a couple of sporting interests, a few quotes…it soon builds up.
If I was an investigative reporter, I could have gone on to search for him on Friends Reunited, Facebook, MySpace et al. Indiscrete holidays snaps? Secret school loves?
Try it…it is a truly amazing and rather frightening experience.
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The doom mongers reckon that, in the wake of datagate, the average man and woman in the street will be less likely to give out personal information. Hopefully, it will make people think twice, but we are not really that easily spooked, are we?
In this nanny state, where our elected representatives pontificate, and sometimes legislate, on everything from parenting to the amount of salt you put on your chips, are a couple of lost CD’s really going to drive us to tick opt-out boxes on the electoral roll?
Half the fun of reading our newspapers for me lies in the scare stories. Of course ‘losing’ 25,000,000 sets of banks details is serious, but no one has had their identity stolen as a result yet, have they?
The fact is the disks are probably being used as a coffee mat by some likely lad in a hoodie and a baseball cap as he signs off in triplicate for another 20 paperclips. We do need to keep things in perspective.
My perspective is that trust, as ever, is crucial for our future. If anything, datagate is a wake up call, and not only to the government. Imagine the damage to a brand if this had been a bank?
Data collection is another of those dark arts. We all fill out the forms, but the obvious truth is that most people do not think about where that information is going and how it is going to be used. Of course, they either tick or do not tick the DM box, because they sort of know what that is all about, but they still fill out all the other boxes, willy nilly.
Someone steeped in B2C data once told me that by the age of 40, the average adult appears on over 200 different databases. Maybe a handful of those will be government run and owned. Following some cross-pollination and analysis, your whole life is laid bare…house moves, name changes, mortgages, salary, credit cards, children, car ownership. We just fill out the forms, usually because we are buying something and we just want to do the deal and get out and enjoy it.
We are all guilty of it. I keep promising myself that I am going to refuse to fill one of those forms out one day, but I never do. My chairman did actually refuse to buy a car because he objected to some of the personal information the dealership was asking for. They let him walk away. They actually lost the sale for a bit of mindless form-filling.
Nothing major will change post datagate. All the usual suppressions will continue to rise and electoral roll opt-outs will too, probably. They were rising anyway. Identity theft is just the latest scare story.
Sure it happens, in the same way as burglaries, car-jacking and muggings happen. Not on a massive scale. People will realise that, in time. If you trust an organisation or brand, you will probably give them information. If you trust a web site, you will purchase on-line. If you feel safe, you will, if you are nervous you won’t.
But watch your computer, did you know that at midnight on New Year’s Eve, every computer in the world is going to melt?
In B2B, email is still the Holy Grail. Only about 1m emails exist, I reckon, and if you de-duped the various files available and took out all the generic addresses, I bet you could halve that number. Take out all the dodgy opt-in processes and you could probably halve it again. This makes no sense.
People are still scared to opt-in to business email. They treat it like the early days when spam ruled, before the ISP’s got wise to the problem. They treat it like they used to treat their private email address, and that is crazy.
My private address is everywhere. I have free ad-ware and spy-ware software, a good virus checker, and receive almost no spam. If I get annoyed with someone sending me too much rubbish, I unsubscribe. No biggie.
At work, for the majority of people, the security is even better. Email is much less intrusive than a phone call, to me, and yet most people would rather give out their direct line than opt-in for email. I cannot understand that.
As the DMA ponders a green manifesto to reduce waste, isn’t this the biggest issue? If we could get the punters to take email seriously, we could reduce waste by the tonne.
It needs more regulation. I have actually read the rule book, and I still think there are grey areas in B2B email, where consumer regulations do not really apply. That is the bits that I understood, of course.
Someone is bound to drag up figures about email wasting half the average lifespan of our employees per month, thus making them less productive, but I do not buy that at all. Email is always there, but it does not ring on your desk and demand you to leap on it. It does not get tossed in your waste bin.
So how about a campaign to make email the acceptable face of direct marketing?
HMRC did not remove sensitive data from the lost disks of datagate to save spending £5,000. Can you imagine the furore if a bank did the same thing? Having loaded cost onto the DM industry, often without allowing us to have a say in making the regulations work, this really is a bit rich.
Has anyone ever totted up what it costs us to run files against TPS and CTPS, just to make sure that some poor unsuspecting SOHO has not signed up for the wrong one?
No, I didn’t think so.
And then, they never prosecute anyone for abusing the system in the first place, so it was all a waste of money anyway. But if I did get caught, and felt the honourable urge to resign, I am fairly sure that would not mean retiring on full pension rights, like the top man from the HMRC, allegedly.
Do not get me wrong. I do not want to hang any poor unsuspecting HMRC minion for their mistake, and I am not even going to call on Golden Brown and his merry men to throw in the white towel, either.
No point really, since the next lot are unlikely to do much better or worse. Rather like the England football team, I think we need a root and branch review of data and data use in and out of government.
Now that’s a thought, Steve McClaren is available…
ROI alone should not be seen as a short-term measure of success in B2B DM. Immediate response from any campaign is great when it happens, but the point is opening lines of communication, making contact and being visible to potential clients is, or should be, a continuous process.
Businesses do not make impulse purchases like consumers. Any campaign will hit at the right time for some people, but mostly this is about making a connection. Follow up telephone calls can tease out a greater response rate, of course. But that does not mean that those who did not respond, or show any interest in any follow up, are a waste of time.
Far from it. I can still name you a dozen or so businesses who have mailed me regularly over the years with no immediate joy, but if I had a need for their products, I would go and look for them.
So, DM creates brand awareness…this should not come as a surprise. It is not only about selling. Informing and educating customers is important, and has the same long-term benefits.
Making prospects smile works, too. Of course, DM is seen primarily as part of the sales process, but it is more than that. It should form part of a broader communication strategy that works in tandem with PR, brand awareness and product knowledge.
That is why we need to invest in prospect pools, and take ownership of them. In B2B, if you have identified your targets, if at first you don’t succeed…try, try, try again.
Opt-in for all direct marketing is going to happen. Most people accept that, although we will clearly all fight tooth and nail to resist it. What does that mean for B2B data? How are we going to have to change?
Running an online directory, this is a subject close to my heart. When you think about it, there are relatively few data ‘owners’. Most B2B databases are ‘blended’ together from a variety of sources, and there is very little opt-in in there.
The directory side of things has a sort of covert opt-in. By registering for a directory, like Countyweb, free of charge, you sign up for the data being sold on. It is not hidden, but it is also not highlighted, either. It is the price that you pay for free marketing exposure.
In a brave new opt-in world, I believe this will need to become a lot more overt. It must become a transaction, because there never was any such thing as a free lunch. Only data owners will be able to do this, and only then if their model is adaptable. I can see online directories offering free registration in return for an opt-in, and charging a fee for going in the directory if this opt-in is not given. Then enhanced advertising packages will continue to be sold as a separate issue.
Ownership will confer power. The ever-increasing horde of list providers who license their data from someone else will either find that data no longer available or getting a lot more expensive to license.
The same will be true for clients. ‘Owning’ their prospect pool by opening up a dialogue and maintaining a right to communicate will be essential, because cold data will be more expensive. It will make much more sense to license a prospect pool from a data owner and receive updates on a regular basis.
Having joined in a bit of hand wringing on this issue myself in the past, I have to admit that I am starting to see some advantages as well as all the disadvantages of opt-in. I think a reduced amount of suppliers will be healthy without causing a monopoly. I think it will allow data owners to concentrate on data quality rather than competing with all the cowboys selling data like baked beans.
I also think it will make people (consumers or businesses) think about whether or not they opt-in, because data owners will be offering something in return, or conversely, refusing to offer something if opt-in is not given.
Personally, I think this is a debate we have to have, and we have to have it soon. We need to lobby the government to have an influence on any regulations that are put in place. We cannot afford to let them impose things on us from high, but it does not mean that the end of the world is nigh, either.
In this ‘government of all the talents’ one seems to be missing. Okay, maybe a little more than one. So before the management accountants descend on HMRC to leverage a damage limitation exercise from the ashes of disaster, at huge cost to the taxpayer, why don’t we try to help them out?
Procedures ignored or not even in place? A lack of understanding of the risks involved? As the dust of political sabre rattling settles around Captain Darling and his recently promoted predecessor passes the buck faster than your average Russian Ice Hockey player, what exactly do they do now?
No doubt the Sir Humphrey’s and Jim Hacker’s have a cunning plan, or is that Baldrick? I can never remember. Hopefully it involves bringing in some real experts. Various GMTV presenters have allegedly been offered roles in the government, speaking up for children…or was it rabbits? So isn’t now the time to get someone in who is used to handling data?
Government in practise seems to be about passing forms around. The smelly stuff only hits the fan when they try to store it on a database, and potentially share it around.
So why don’t we suggest a few industry guru’s who could help them out?
I’ll start.
I nominate Rosemary Smith, DMA Chair. She knows more than is strictly necessary about data protection, would eat your average MP for breakfast and could carry off an ermine trimmed cloak with her usual style.
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Hitting the right desk is not enough. Much as it pains me to say it, the best data does not guarantee a response. We should all know that. Even if you have your envelope in the hands of the target audience, they have to want to open it, and you have to encourage them to read the contents before having any chance of getting a response. So we need creative input to make it all work.
One of my pet hobbyhorses is the view of marketing expenditure as a cost rather than an investment. What price a good creative? Accountants shudder at the thought of an invoice based on blue-sky thinking and inspiration. As a Marcoms manager, some years ago, I was once asked to justify an invoice for £17,000 for creating a double page spread. I asked the agency the same question, and instead of a list of actual costs got back an essay on the value of creative input. I wish I had kept it.
It is not always that expensive, but creative should be valued, nevertheless. Hold your own awards over a week of DM that hits your desk. You will be able to spot the DIY copywriting and the no frills approaches of the SME.
I think that is a shame. Marketing is a team effort, in an ideal world. Whatever your budget, you can afford to get professional help on the things that matter.
Data matters, because if you do not hit the right targets you are wasting time and money. But the mailing piece itself matters, too.
Copywriting and design are worth investing in. Even the small business can find local agencies or freelancers who can add conspicuous value at an agreed budget.
Earlier this month, I blogged about the frightening ability to put so much data in your pocket and carry it out of the building. Now HM Revenue and Customs have done just that, and to make matters worse, they went and lost it, too…
Ending the career of Mr Paul Gray, who carries the can but is unlikely to be the one really to blame. If, like me, you receive child benefit, our bank details are now out there somewhere, and in the next hour, as I type this, Alastair Darling is going to explain himself to the house.
Any day now I can see the list appearing somewhere. 15,000,000 parents, selectable by number of kids, postcode, bank details and NI number, £50 per thousand for a single mailing – cash only.
Poor Mr Gray…poor Darling.
Mind you, if the Information Commissioner gets his way, Mr Gray might have been facing criminal charges…or is that just aimed at the DM Industry? So the only sentence Mr Gray will probably get is the chairmanship of a quango, somewhere.
I’m sorry I have a cold. Well, it’s man flu really, but it’s making me more than usually cynical. However, there is a serious point here. Data is dangerous. Even the government have to take this seriously. I am sure Darling will give his excuses to the house, and I am sure the other lot will call for his head, but it won’t help me if what little cash Mrs B has left in my account in the run up to Crimble is stolen, now will it?
Some suggestions, and then you can give me yours. First, make data theft a crime, as the ICO wants. Not just a wrist slap. People have lost cases concerning data theft, but the compensation paid was a joke. No deterrent there. Secondly, someone in power has to get the government’s act together. This is not good enough. They hold more data about you and me than anyone in the DM industry has ever dreamed of, and yet it walks out the door on a few CD’s?
Have you got any confidence in Golden Brown to build databases? No, me neither, and I doubt Call Me Dave will fare much better, come his turn at the wheel of fortune.
In the trade mags over the last week or two, it seems that our only hope for salvation is the ever-greater use of suppression files, to prevent waste, which is the obvious green mantra, and stop (some) junk mail. Not true, IMHO.
Mailing people who are no longer there, in either B2C or B2B, is an occupational hazard in the DM industry. No matter how hard you try, or whatever suppression file you pin your hat on, it will happen. It all comes down to the percentage of failure, x% is acceptable, y% is not.
I have said it before, and I will say it again – I have nothing against suppression. It works on a level, and each campaign manager should consider the use of standard suppression files. However, to a certain extent, I am starting to come to the conclusion that we are missing the point here.
I wrote an earlier blog about DM putting too much store in addressing an envelope to an individual, and I am becoming more and more convinced that this is true. It is people who move, die, change their names or add themselves to the huge variety of suppression files now available. The house, office or desk often remain the same, and it is the house, office or desk that we use to target prospects. Armed with the information that one Hugh Bessant lives in Reigate, at a given post code, with a clean credit record and the usual appearances on credit card applications and other examples of personal transactional activity, it is not the name that counts.
As a consumer, my postcode is probably of more relevance. That is where all the assumptions are made about me. In a business environment, the fact that I am what I am is of less relevance than the fact the business exists and has someone in my position. It is the business that will attract potential suppliers, and the job title which will be targeted. It is not personal.
So if a definition of junk or waste is that the envelope is addressed to the wrong person, an easier and cheaper way to cure the problem would be to de-personalise the marketing effort in the first place.
Let’s face it, we are targeting market segments. As a consumer, our postcode segments us in the majority of cases. As a business, SIC code, size and job title.
I do not advocate an attack of dear occupier mailings to leafy Surrey. Surely we can be more creative than that. It is not as if the right name and address ever exactly hides the fact that it is DM, is it?
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It is a good job prosecutions for abusing the CTPS suppression file are few and far between…like world cups hosted in England or British tennis players winning Wimbledon. Because when you think about it, the regulations make it almost impossible to stay on the right side of the line. Not that anyone cares…
Responsibility for making sure no one on CTPS gets sales calls lies solely with the end-user, but most suppliers sell data that is CTPS compliant, whatever that means. I am only not sure what it means to all the other suppliers, but I can tell you what I means to me, of course. It means we run our file against CTPS during our monthly cleansing process – and we make this clear to customers.
Our data is suppressed against all the usual suppressions ONCE a month. So that is fine, isn’t it? Well, no actually, it probably isn’t.
Data users are obliged to run their data against CTPS every 28 days. So, let us say that the data supplier uploads a fresh, cleaned and suppressed file on the last day of the month, and that CTPS was the last thing run, the very second before the file was refreshed. Three weeks later, approaching the sales week of the next month, when most business is inevitably done and data delivered, that file is 21 days old. I would love to think that all our clients are sitting waiting for their data with nothing better to do, but they aren’t, are they? So unless they call all that data the second the buy it, they should be running it against CTPS again before they use it.
Are they? No sniggering at the back of the class, please. If taken to task by the regulator, their defence will be that the data was CTPS compliant, and in that unlikely event…akin to winning the lottery twice with the same numbers…they will get warned as to their future behaviour. So everyone is happy, aren’t they?
Personally, no. I think everyone who has bought a license for CTPS has wasted their money, and everyone who has signed up for it wasted their time. It will not make the license holder money and it will not stop nuisance calls. The registration system is full of holes bigger than Blackburn, Lancashire, and the 28 days rule is unworkable.
Having blogged about businesses starting to exploit social networking sites as a new marketing channel, I promised to follow up, checking out some of the new developments. Wake up one and all, and be afraid…be very afraid.
Facebook has seen a lot of business led advertising groups springing up, as I reported last week. Real new age DM, I suppose. B2C almost exclusively at present, for obvious reasons, so a little off-topic, but as a new channel, open to all, I think it merits a little time. Because the power of free speech is quite awesome.
One brand, Primark, has even decided not to create it’s own group, because there is already a very successful, and very positive, Primark ‘fans’ group in existence. Check it out, it makes interesting reading.
Another, Virgin Media, ought to be conducting a damage limitation exercise. As a customer, I can understand the groundswell of complaints. There are service issues, and the recent, well-publicised spat with Sky is causing some anger (you try explaining to an 8yo why he can’t watch an Arsenal game on Sky, when we do subscribe to Sky Sports, because Sky have put it on Sky One, and a bunch of grown-ups can’t act in the mutual best interests of their customers!).
So the consumer has taken things into their own hands with a vengeance. Some interesting issues here for us marketing types. Primark obviously do not mind that their ‘fans’ are using their logo and brand names willy-nilly. Virgin probably do. When your logo appears beside a lot of negative and expletive ridden comments, it must damage the brand.
On first impressions, consumer brands who believe that they have a loyal following and can create some discussion, some buzz, and some excitement must do something. This is an unusual channel. You have to search for it, and unlike the web, the results that you get will include everything – the positive groups as well as the negative.
Can Virgin Media, for instance, convince Facebook to remove the negative stuff? I think an attempt to do so might be as damaging as leaving it there. One thing is for sure – you have to try to take control, before someone else does it for you, and you find yourself a prisoner of freedom of speech.
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MPS, FPS, TPS and CTPS are large files, growing fast, fuelled by all the bad press DM gets, and the frustrations caused at the coalface. But how many rogue users have been prosecuted? How many times are these suppression files being abused? Personally, I would like to know what is really going on, how many consumers are complaining after signing up for MPS or TPS?
My suspicion is quite a few. Signing up for MPS will stop a lot of ‘legitimate’ DM falling through the letterbox, but it will not stop it all. In fact, I am willing to bet that it stops the most targeted stuff – most likely to be of use to the householder – but fails to stop the real junk mail, the stuff that made the householder sign up in the first place.
The same with TPS. The annoying cretins who keep ringing you every few weeks to see if you have developed a sudden urge for double-glazing, despite the fact that you have asked them to take you off their list several times, are almost certain to ignore TPS. So a few disgruntled punters must complain, so why isn’t anything happening?
Rather than talking about getting the DM industry to publicise MPS on each mailing piece, why won’t the regulator name, shame and punish? We should be stepping up the pressure to deter unprofessional marketing contact, and thus encouraging best practise, so that less people are annoyed enough to sign up for suppression.
We need good suppression files, but promoting them does not solve our problems, it magnifies them. Whilst the universe shrinks, the good guys suffer, working within the rules, and the bad guys rub their hands with glee. Less DM will be hitting doormats, so the chances of anyone bothering to complain about the abuse of the suppression files actually goes down.
According to Marketingservices.com at any rate. That is a shocking figure, although I might argue with the details, and it just goes to show what a state we are in. When are we going to stop the rot?
I suspect this figure is slightly misleading.
Although CTPS is growing steadily, it is not businesses that sign up it is individual phone lines. However, I think it serves as yet another reminder that things are badly wrong. My problem with CTPS is that anyone can sign up their phone number. If it is the receptionist at a big building, he/she can sign up the main line, to stop their switchboard ringing so much. No director signature is required.
Now I am not against suppression, at all. As a consumer, I guard my privacy the same as anyone else, and we should be able to stop cold calls and cold mailings if we want too, but a business is very different.
Most of those businesses, if not all of them, that have allowed some of their lines to be signed up for CTPS will have sales operations themselves. They will be cold-calling people. To allow someone within their organisation to block cold calls to them smacks of hypocrisy. Not only that, it may well do the business more harm than good. They may not be aware of alternative suppliers for many goods and services as a result, and that could hurt the bottom line.
At least the regulator has changed the system to confirm the suppression every twelve months, but to make it fair, and worthwhile, each registration should be confirmed by someone in authority at each business. Then, with the unlikely risk of being fined for abusing the system, the system might start to work, and the industry would at least have a chance of trying to change people’s minds.
As it is, the scrupulous are finding it harder and harder to find an audience to legally call, whilst the unscrupulous get away with annoying people.
In America, the US DMA have just launched their ‘Power of Direct Marketing’ report. They predict that, for the first time, DM will account for more than half of total annual US advertising expenditure. Every $1 dollar spent generates $11.69 in revenue.
DM in the US employs 10.6 million people or 7.5% of the workforce. DM sales will generate $2.025 TRILLION. Cor blimey, mate. The reason for continued growth is given as DM being measurable, accountable and trackable. Of course.
In the UK, similar studies suggest that we contributed £43.7b to the UK economy in 2006, and employed 886,000 people, 3.1% of the UK workforce.
Cool statistics, aren’t they? Better than the old joke – how many people work in the DM industry…answer, about half of them. Still, it puts all the criticism of what we do into sharp perspective. I wonder if Golden Brown has run the numbers on further regulating the industry – Labour will never get another seat in Soho again.
Seriously though, that is a lot of people. We should be looking for positives about our industry and there is one right here. We are big, we create a lot of cash, pay a lot of taxes and we can tell you where the money goes. It is all highly visible and accountable.
Some food for thought in the American small print, though. Commercial email marketing was the star, for every $1 spent, you get a return of $48.56 – four times the average.
Hugh Bessant
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Last login: 20 Nov 2008
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