The Customer Persona: Your Guiding Star for Direct Response Marketing Success
When you’re writing a marketing message, developing a sales offer, or designing a piece of creative, who, exactly, are you creating it for? As marketers, we need to tailor our communications as tightly as possible to the specifications of our target audience so our offers adequately reach, resonate, and drive response.
Thankfully, there’s a handy tool—the customer persona—that can help your strategic and creative teams deliver effectively targeted messages and offers that convert. Let’s take a closer look at this guiding star of direct response creative success.
5 Things You Need to Know About Your B2B Customers for Direct Marketing Success
There’s practically no limit to the number of things you’d like to know about your customers, from their email address to exactly how much of their annual budget they have to spend with you. But when it comes to what we need to know about them to inspire relevant direct response offers, spark creative ideas and deploy measurable and profitable campaigns, some data points rise to the top.Read more
3 Steps to Success: Direct Response Marketing and the Up-Sell
There’s more than one way to motivate your existing customers to buy more or spend more, either at the point of purchase or after the sale. Usually, sales and marketing folks employ the cross-sell or the up-sell; those with the greatest success know when, how, and with whom to use each technique.
Cross-sell vs. Up-sell
Straightaway, let’s get our terms straight. Cross-sell and up-sell aren’t the same thing, as we explain in our simple example from The Art and Science of the Direct Response Marketing Cross-Sell: Instead of suggesting to a fast food customer that fries would go excellently with their cheeseburger (a cross-sell), you entice them with an upgrade to a double cheeseburger (up-sell).
Put another way, a cross-sell encourages existing customers to purchase a complementary or related product or service, while an upsell promotes the purchase of a higher-end offering (i.e. a more expensive model or one with more “bells and whistles”).Read more
How Can Instagram Support Direct Response Marketing?
You might think of Instagram as a platform for people to connect, primarily through beautiful images and videos, with their friends, family, and favorite celebrities. It is, but there’s so much more.
According to Instagram, over 200 million Instagrammers visit at least one business profile daily. Why are they visiting business profiles? To engage with their favorite brands, to learn about new brands, and to take advantage of direct response offers they see in posts.Read more
5 Best Practices for Warming Up a Cold Email List
It happens. Email lists go cold. Several weeks (or months) go by and a number of your contacts haven’t heard from you. This could be your entire email database—or just the people who haven’t taken action on any of your previous offers and aren’t part of an existing nurturing campaign.
But either way, they’ve opted-in to receive communications and you know they’re potentially valuable leads and prospects who might be ready to re-engage.
Here, we’re sharing our best practices—and brightest ideas—for warming up email lists that have run cold. Read more