When the Marketing Response is Disappointing

In the online marketing class I'm currently teaching, someone had sent a pitch to a number of prospective clients and was unhappy with the result. Given that many writers send out letters of introduction to multiple companies as part of a marketing push, I thought it would make sense to address the issue.

Although this seems to be a basic type of marketing, it actually falls into an advanced form called direct marketing. Yes, all the junk mail and spam you receive and all the infomercials and full-page pitches in magazines and newspapers you see are actually advanced forms of marketing. They use varying degrees of marketing savvy, mathematical analysis, writing technique, and design innovation to be effective. Your success depends on the following:

• Picking the right target audience.
• Identifying the specific members of the audience to contact.
• Finding some hook or offer that will be compelling to them.
• Creating materials that adequately present the offer and overcome objections.
• Dealing in larger numbers.

That last point is the focus of this post. When you undertake direct marketing, there are a number of places where things can and will go wrong:

1. You may not be able to identify people who would be the perfect fit.
2. Those who would be a good fit might have no need for what you're selling at the moment.
3. They might have a need, but your pitch might not provide an offer that pushes them into action.
4. There may be something off-putting about your marketing.
5. They might not even look at what you sent, assuming it to be "junk" or "spam."
You could be targeting the wrong person at the prospect company.
6. You might do inadequate follow-up to close any business.

Any of these can kill off the chance of getting work from a particular prospect, and a number of them may be a problem at some times but not at others. For example, even if you reach a company that needs writers and somehow find the person in charge of retaining their services, that person might have just hired a few writers for all the projects they have over the next few months.

Direct marketing is generally judged in terms of the percentage of desired responses that you are trying to get. You've probably heard of the "two percent" rule of thumb. Toss that out the window. There is no single rules of thumb. Some campaigns would be doing fabulously well to get two percent of the recipients to respond. For others that are more narrowly targeted, that amount might be failure. That is because direct marketers analyze how much profit the client is likely to bring in over time and the cost of reaching each one. If the total profit from the business is larger than the total cost of the campaign, you're making money. If it's lower, you're losing money. Then it's an issue of whether you're making enough money for the expenses and time you're putting into the project.

To even begin judging how your campaign went, you must ask a number of questions:

• Who was your target audience?
• How did you select the companies?
• Who did you target within the companies?
• How much research did you do on these companies?
• How many pitches did you send?
• How many companies did you contact?
• How many of these companies gave you at least one assignment before you followed up?
• After the follow up, how many had given you at least one assignment?

If you've sent out 20 LOIs and received two assignments, you're getting a ten percent response, which would generally be considered very healthy. Even if you get one assignment from an email campaign this small, you are doing well. If you don't get one, it might be that there is a problem with your letter, but that is hard to say because you aren't sending enough to measure your success. I can't stress that enough. Say that you have a campaign that we know from extensive past experience would get a three percent response - out of every 100 contacts, we've seen that you get about three assignments. Send it to 20 people, and the numbers say that you'd get 0.6 assignments. You're sending it to so few people that even if the campaign is successful, you might get no assignments on that round.

Until you start to understand the dynamics of direct marketing and look at your results in context, you may be doing better than you think.