While it's a common refrain from most companies to say that data is at the heart of their marketing decisions, very few back up their words with action like Vocus. The provider of on-demand software for public relations management showed this in its latest quarterly direct mail offering, dropped in mid-July.
Immediately, recipients encounter the invitational-style envelope of the mail piece. According to in-house research done by Vocus over the last five years, invitational-style envelopes consistently have outperformed other envelope styles in getting recipients to open the piece.
As recipients open the envelope, they are again greeted by design and content decisions based on data, all revolving around the central goal of the mail piece-to get recipients to schedule product demos of Vocus' on-demand software. To help drive the lead generation campaign, Vocus makes an attractive offer to recipients: In exchange for taking the product demo, recipients receive a free $50 Barnes & Noble gift card (Archive code #836-700506-0908).
"The demo offer is an incentive essentially to get people to simply look at the product, because once they do we have such a strong response to it that it makes the offer make sense," says Inga Broerman, Vocus' vice president of marketing, noting that Vocus has done extensive research to ensure including this offer makes sense financially. "We analyze every possible metric that you can imagine, and we know what the results of those are down to the ROI of individual test cells."
Barnes & Noble wasn't chosen at random from a group of retailers. Based on response to previous offers, the bookseller has proven a popular choice for Vocus' targeted demographic of public relations professionals and marketers. "Our audience tends to be focused on acquiring information, and for synthesizing that, Barnes & Noble really appeals to them," says Broerman.
Another facet of Vocus' data-driven approach is found in the business reply postcard included in the mailing. To help better segment future mailings, the company asks recipients to indicate what type of business they're from, as well as their businesses' annual revenues. This information also helps in a more immediate manner to dictate where the leads are routed within Vocus' sales department.
With three channels for recipients to respond to the mailing and schedule demos-online, mail or phone-Vocus tracks the metrics of each channel, including response rates, qualification levels of responders, and close rates and ROI of entire accounts. While additional effort is required to track the different metrics of each response channel, Vocus offers recipients all three options because when compiled together, the metrics for all three are simply too good to pass up.
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