Tag Archive for Customer Characteristics

20 Mar 2011
Design

Cultural Meaning of Color

To continue with our last post about the power of color, we stumbled across a site called Information is Beautiful that posted a great chart that featured 84 feelings and emotions and the colors associated with them in the following cultures: Western/American, Japanese, Hindu, Native American, Chinese, Asian, Eastern European, Muslim, African and South American.

Some of the interpretations for Western or American cultures are:

Red – Anger, Courage, Danger, Desire, Excitement, Heat, Love, Passion, Radicalism
Blue – Cold, Freedom, Healing, Intelligence, Loyalty, Rational, Unhappiness
Yellow – Cowardice, Energy, Fun, Happiness, Money, Peace, Repels Evil
Purple – Decadence, Flamboyance, Mystery, Personal Power, Virtue
Green – Good Luck, Growth, Jealousy, Nature
Black – Authority, Death, Evil, Mourning, Style
White – Heaven, Luxury, Marriage, Purity, Truce
Brown – Earthy, Reliable
Pink – Femininity
Orange – Friendly
Gray – Respect

We hope you can use some of this information as you craft your marketing and mailing messages.

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21 Feb 2011
Advertising • Buying Behavior • Direct Mail

Direct Mail and Marketing Response Numbers

We have shared many statistics the past year about response numbers. We think we should review some of them.

More than 70% of Gen Yers (born 1977-1994) and Gen Xers (born 1965-1976) sort their mail immediately.

76% of internet users were directly influenced to buy an item or service thanks to direct mail.

78% of email recipients do not open the message, so that means that 94.1% of email recipients are not clicking through to your landing page.

55% of survey respondents cannot effectively measure marketing ROI of mobile, social media and video.

65% of companies had not increased revenue or profited using social media.

79% of all households read or scan the advertising mail sent to their home.

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16 Feb 2011
Direct Mail

To-Do List Management

BNET recently interviewed David Allen abut 3 Reasons Your To-Do List Keeps Getting Longer.

  1. Personal organization tools don’t get you organized.
  2. Technology won’t help, it is making things worse.
  3. It’s not about managing time, it’s about managing your attention and focus.

So thinking about your customers, how can you help them? Present your information in a way that allows them to give it attention and focus. Direct mail is a great way to do that. The Mail Moment study gave us: “Right now – in a market you want to reach – your ideal prospect is just waiting for the moment. She’s eager to invite you in to see what your message can bring to her life. She’s even willing to set aside time to focus solely on what you have to say.”

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31 Jan 2011
Buying Behavior

Is It The End of the Marketing Funnel

Marketing has grown more complicated, media choices have exploded, and consumers have asserted themselves more visibly than ever before. So perhaps some of the classical ways to understand and visualize marketing concepts, need to change and evolve too.

Forbes.com shared some information from Forrester that found that 53% of U.S. online consumers research products online that they’ll then purchase in the store. This process exposes consumers to brands they might not have previously considered, expanding their consideration set at exactly the point where, according to the traditional funnel, it should narrow.

The author, Forester analyst, Steve Noble proposes to bury the marketing funnel and introduce a new model–the customer life cycle.

Discover: Every customer must discover a brand, product category, or personal need–the initial trigger that leads to a new or repeat purchase.

Explore: In this phase, customers explore the brand–and their options. When visiting an online store or handling products in a well-crafted shop environment, customers are immersing themselves in the explore phase.

Buy: Customer experiences during this phase include product availability, inventory lookup, and satisfaction with the checkout process. It also includes the actual price paid, the perceived value, and the experience with the sales channel if there is a problem.

Engage: After buying a product or service, customers engage with brands in several ways.

We reported on the evolution of the way people make buying decisions based on some data from McKinsey. That study found that “traditional” marketing was still a very important part of the buying process, it just happened earlier. This latest information from Forrester Research also supports the important role that direct mail can play in the buying process, during the discovery and engagement phases.

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03 Jan 2011
Advertising

Unkown Facts About Advertising

A great blog post from The Ad Contrarian published this list of ten great facts that deserve to keep going.

Top 10 Double-Secret Unknown Facts About Advertising

  1. 99.9% of people who are served an online display ad do not click on it.
  2. TV viewership is now at its highest point ever.
  3. 96% of all retail activity is done in a store. 4% is done on line.
  4. DVR owners watch live TV 95% of the time. 5% of the time they watch recorded material.
  5. 99% percent of all video viewing is done on a television. 1% is done on line.
  6. The difference in purchasing behavior between people who use DVRs to skip ads and those who don’t:  None.
  7. Since the 1990s, click-through rates for banner ads have dropped 97.5%.
  8. Since the introduction of TiVo, real time TV viewing has increased over 20%.
  9. Baby boomers dominate 94% of all consumer packaged goods categories. 5% of advertising is aimed at them.
  10. TV viewers are no more likely to leave the room during a commercial break than they are before or after the break.

The author, Bob Hoffman, CEO of Hoffman/Lewis, listed the following as his sources.

  1. DoubleClick, Benchmark Report, 2009
  2. Nielsen Three Screen Report, Q1 2010
  3. U.S. Department of Commerce, Q2 2010; Nielsen Three Screen Report, Q1 2010
  4. Duke University, Do DVRs Influence Sales?
  5. Nielsen Three Screen Report, Q1 2010
  6. Duke University, Do DVRs Influence Sales?
  7. Li, Hairong; Leckenby, John D. (2004). “Internet Advertising Formats and Effectiveness”. Center for Interactive Advertising. And DoubleClick, Benchmark Report, 2009
  8. NielsenWire, Nov. 10, 2009
  9. Marketing Daily, July 22, 2010
  10. Council for Research Excellence, May 10, 2010
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20 Dec 2010
Direct Mail

An “Edu-Mail-Cation”?

We recently received an email from a customer that read “Thanks for my edu-mail-cation!”

It is a great play on words and such a part of what we do that we thought it would be fun to share it.

Are you wondering what some of the newest acronyms mean? Or if some new technology is really going to help you or save you money? Have you always wondered if there was more than one way to define your customers? Give us a call or send us an email, we would be honored to share what we know.

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10 Dec 2010
Advertising • Marketing Strategy

High End Consumers Don’t Like Splashy Logos

Low- and high-end fashion products tend to have less conspicuous brand markers than midprice goods, according to a paper published in The Journal of Consumer Research. 87% of sunglasses priced $100 to $200 carry a brand name or logo, the same is true for only 28% in the over-$600 price range, according to research by Jonah Berger of Penn and others.

Maybe this information will help you as you craft your direct mail and other marketing messages.

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06 Dec 2010
List • Marketing Strategy

Generate Sales Fast

If you’re looking for a reliable way to bring in revenue, the best place to start is by contacting your best customers.

Start by Segmenting Your Customer List

Your best customers are the most likely to purchase. Try dividing by sales or average order size. Analyzing your customers will identify strategic breaking points between groups. When you sort your customers’ sales activity, from highest to lowest and cumulate sales and calculate percentage of total sales, you may be surprised. The top customers will reliably respond to your offers.

Let Customers Know You Miss Them

We Miss You

“We Miss You” offers

Just because someone cancelled last year, or you have not heard from them in a while, doesn’t mean the sale is gone forever. Mail a “We want you back” offer. It will produce more sales than cold prospecting letters.

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01 Dec 2010
Advertising • Marketing Strategy

Great Marketing Power in Hands of Few

Following up on our post about Marketing Power and the suggestion that 80% to 90% of people believe reviews posted by customers.

Forrester Research’s Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, authors of Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business have found that just 16% of users of blogs, review sites and social networking sites generate 80% of the messages posted about products and services.

They also found that 62% of all messages about products and services are posted via Facebook alone.

That is amazing to think that so few people have so much power to shape opinions about your products and services. It is also not too far from the classic 80 – 20 rule of 80% of business coming from 20% of customers and 80% of complaints coming from 20% of people.

What can we do to help you court these sought after “super customers”?

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27 Jul 2010
Buying Behavior

Happiness Depends on Age

The New York Times reported on a Gallup Poll that found that people start out at age 18 feeling pretty good about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to get challenging. They feel worse and worse until they hit 50. At that point, there is a sharp reversal, and people keep getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18.

We hope you see opportunities and optimism with this information. Not only do you know that life will continue to get better, but you now have great information as you craft your marketing messages. Understanding some of the emotions of your target audience will help you as you write compelling appeals. This is a great complement to marketing to people during life changing events.

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