It’s a system!

Posted Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 in General

In today’s world of design and marketing we need to be focusing on more than just the piece in front of us. Let’s think of design and marketing as a system and not one project. We need to be asking ourselves “what’s next” while designing the current piece or mapping out our newest marketing campaign. If we keep thinking about how this drives the next piece or step we will find ourselves creating more meaningful pieces for our target audience as we progress through the campaign.

If we take a look at our iPod giveaway campaign from a couple of years ago we can see how this all comes together. We started with our customer list and designed a piece with variable data and personalized URLs (PURLs). The piece had a call to action on it that would ask the recipient to go to their PURL on the web and complete the survey in order to be registered for the iPod. While developing the survey questions we kept asking ourselves “what action does this question drive?”. Usually it was another segment of our database which is exactly what we wanted. We wanted to create groups of people that we could speak to on a more personal level during the next piece and that can only happen when you have specific messages for specific groups. Another question we asked in our survey, sticking with the music theme of the iPod, was “What is your favorite genre of music?”. This seems like a whimsical question at first but as a designer my mind quickly started having images of a rock and roll design, a country music design and so on. Now that we have a segmented list of people who answered questions in a particular way we can also associate a design that grabs their attention because they told us they like rock and roll or country and this just isn’t information you can buy through a list provider. We had to get that information on our own. That campaign and information gathering process drove sales leads for at least 6 months. It was a memorable piece that averaged a 15% response rate which is way, way above the industry norm of 1% – 1.5%.

I want to be clear that no one component drove those results. It was a combination of good planning, good design, a great giveaway and the necessary tools to track the results and leads and then good follow through by our sales department. Our ROI on this particular project was outstanding, not results I would expect every time, but it shows the possibility of a multichannel campaign. Next time you start to put together a piece ask yourself what your next step will be. If you draw a blank, you could probably get more bang for your buck.