Marketing campaign planning is hard but marketers who plan and set goals are much more likely to have their campaigns succeed. Setting your goals should include the SMART technique. (Don’t know what that is? Read my blog on campaign planning here.) It is essentially setting realistic, achievable targets for your campaign to reach. Speaking from personal experience, I always find this part the hardest thing to do when I’m planning my campaigns for PSE. You can use average click-through rates and looking at your past campaigns is excellent for seeing how successful they were. But offline marketing has always been a bit tricky to plan and to see what happens to that mail piece once it’s been delivered. Enter JICMail.
JicMail helps paint a picture of what happens to your Direct Mail or Door Drop piece when it lands in the home, who reads it, how many times is it read and how quickly your offer acted upon. It also gives you the opportunity to see how consumers are acting on your competitions pieces in the home, using this information, you can factor into your own campaigns. Once you’ve used JIC Mail and you’ve understood the journey this can help you plan the campaign.
What is JICMail
JICMail is constantly surveying 1000 households every month, asking the recipients what mail they received and what they did with it. The second question is where all the data comes in. JICMail checks many data points such as talking about the mail piece with someone, threw piece away, stored for later, bought something on the back of receiving the marketing mailer.
Using JICMail
Using JICMail can help when planning your next marketing campaign in a few ways. Firstly it can help you accurately help you set the goals of your campaign. It can also help you plan who you are going to target within that campaign. Yes, you will target your demographic but maybe break that demographic down further into age brackets based on how certain age groups interact with mail from different industries and so on.
Below I am going to set out a few scenarios to see how PSE and JICMail can help you plan and predict your next marketing campaigns.
Scenario 1
You are an estate agent and want to generate more leads and sales. So decide to do a door drop around the areas of your offices.
You can see that 25-34-year-olds do not receive a lot of mail from this sector. But you as an estate agent know your market and know that for the first time in 7 years young homeowners are outpacing renters. So potentially by marketing to this demographic, you could be cutting through all the noise (of course you would then switch to partially addressed mail to be able to filter down your mailing by age)
As you can see, the younger generation interacts with door drops marketing pieces more than any other age bracket. This further solidifies the fact you definitely should be marketing towards this demographic. Now you know you are going to market your business to 25-34-year-olds using a partially addressed mail system lets see how your campaign will perform.
Outcome
The above graphic shows, using an addressed mail over door drops and marketing to 25-34 age bracket your campaign should:
- Have an average lifespan of 9.8 days (that figure alone is huge. Email and social media adverts would love to have advertising lifespans of anywhere close to that).
- The frequency of interactions is 3.45 (don’t forget the average consumer needs 7 impressions before making a decision to buy from a brand this marketing piece is doing HALF the work for you alone).
- The item reach is 1.18 meaning that this age demographic discuss with other people the marketing message.
- So totalling all this up your 100,000 marketing campaign will reach 118,212 and have 407,831 impacts.
As you can see just from using and looking at a couple of options your campaign has changed from a door drop where you blanket market to people into a highly targeted campaign where you can expect 407,831 interactions with your message. Knowing this information can now help you set out, plan and accurately predict how your campaign will perform. Additionally knowing all this information will direct the rest of the campaign such as design, messaging and offer all geared towards the younger audience.
Scenario 2
In this scenario, we will go even deeper to more accurately predict the outcome of your campaign. You are a nationwide clothes retailer and want to drive more sales by offering a voucher.
Rather than comparing what demographic receives what mail let’s take a look at what the average household did when receiving a piece of mail from the retail sector. The above graphic shows that 11% of the people that received marketing from the retail industry used the voucher or discount code. So you know that you were correct in your original plan that coupons work. As a bonus, 12% discussed the marketing piece with someone else, so your reach is high.
This image is the campaign planner. But we have added the commercial actions. The commercial actions are as follows
ITEMS DRIVING COMMERCIAL ACTIONS: No. of items multiplied by % of items driving a commercial action.
COMMERCIAL ITEM IMPACTS: Number of campaign impacts driven by items on which commercial actions are taken.
COMMERCIAL ITEM IMPACT RATE: % of campaign impacts driven by items on which commercial actions are taken.
This is taking all the hard work out of predicting the performance of the campaign. Now, remember that this is over the whole retail industry and your specific industry, e.g. clothes retailer will differ to electrical retail for a plethora of reasons such as expense and so on. Now predicting your campaign performance should be a sinch.
Conclusion
Planning your campaign is one of the most important jobs of a marketing manager; it keeps your team on track and ensures your campaigns are always driving in the same direction. Marketing without a plan is like driving from point A to B blindfolded without knowing where B is. PSE is here for you from start to finish. We will sit down with you help you plan your next campaign and always offer free unbiased advice.
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