You plan for offensive operations, while you prepare to play defense.  You'll find this concept in both warfare and sports, and it's applicable in business as well.

I much prefer playing offense, because that's where you score and generate revenues. A strong business offensive plan also limits the amount of places you'll need to prepare to play defense, freeing up more resources for--you guessed it--playing more offense.

What's an example of planning as opposed to preparations in a marketing context?

A great example can be found in the United States Postal Service and the annual postage increases.  If you're using direct mail as a marketing channel, you can be sure of two things:

1. Postage will go up, driven by higher USPS costs and the rapid decline in the volume of first class mail.
2. Automation requirements will become more rigid, which limit your ability to be creative in your mail formats.

One of the key cost components of your direct mail marketing efforts is always going to go up (which it has done for years) and is going to go up more rapidly than in the past because of the USPS's need to cover labor costs and, now, energy price increases.

The USPS is trying to counteract the labor cost increases on their side by providing a bigger carrot for mailers who automate their mail more effectively and using a bigger stick (higher prices) on those who don't.

In the past, we used to counteract higher postage rates by getting more creative in the the formats we'd mail. Moving to heavier packages, with larger non-standard sizes paradoxically would counter the postage rate increases.  Not anymore.

So, what's the difference in "planning" for the USPS's annual price action vs. "preparing" for the same?

In "plan" mode, you understand what you're likely to face in the future and are testing for it proactively today. For example, at a past employer,  we knew the USPS was changing the automation requirements to require a certain amount of flexibility in the mailings or face significantly higher postage.  We were using a very rigid piece that was going to lose its automation discount and the price increase would have tanked our ROI.  So, we immediately began testing a number of different formats that met the flexibility requirements for next year, so we'd know the impact on our marketing ROI and could further develop plans to overcome any degradation.

In "prepare" mode, you've got to be ready for anything and then respond in a reactive way. You could prepare by figuring out what the price increase might be.  Or what the automation requirements might be.  Or any other number of things.  Being ready for too many options would suck away marketing resources into planning and analysis and away from the key task of acquiring more customers.  Plus, once you reacted, you still wouldn't know the impact on your ROI.  Rolling out untested responses to competitive or environmental changes is the number one way to destroy your marketing ROI.

Plan = Proactive = Offense

Prepare = Reactive = Defense

Summary and key takeway
When you have the choice, play proactively and play offense.

I'm not saying you shouldn't prepare for the unexpected, whether it be competitive efforts, consumer preference or even the weather.  Instead, you should be aggressively planning to launch new channels, acquire more and better customers and developing new and better products.  Then, on the planning side, be prepared for the 20% of things that could cause major disruptions to your business.

What do you think about the proper Plan to Prepare ratio?  Have you ever had an example where you suddenly realized you were preparing too much and, hence playing defense when you should have been playing offense?

photo credit: selena marie

Bookmark to:

If you're mailing Standard Rate, you've got until Friday to present your material for entry at the USPS at the current rates. I hope you've been getting ready to mail at the old rates.

Is there anything you shouldn't try to get in the mail at this point?

I can think of a couple things.  While it's temping to get your billing out under the current postage rates (typically by accelerating a few bill cycles from next week to this week), my test results have shown that it's not usually worth it.

For every cycle you push into this week (using an example of daily billing cycles and 6 day-a-week payment processing) you reduce the time for the customer's last payment to get into the billing run.

Believe it or not, a lot of customers wait for the last minute to send in payments and they have a very good sense of the time it takes for a payment to work through the USPS.  Customers have a sixth sense about their payment cycles and changes to that timing tends to create problems.

When you move up a payment cycle by even one day, you start causing payments to cross in the mail.  Depending on the product you're selling, the target audience and your billing strategy, you could end up with a significant number of customer service questions and phone calls.

There's almost no good that can come of an irritated customer on the phone on your next bill cycle because their carefully-timed payment happened to cross in the mail.  Mad customers on the phone equals increased churn 100% of the time.

Now, instead of moving up one bill cycle, say from Monday to Friday, what if you do it through Wednesday of next week?  How about Friday?  Well, it gets worse for every bill cycle you move forward.  More payments cross in the mail and they cross earlier.

When you do the math, customer phone calls and churn increases tend to negate any postage savings gained by dropping bills earlier. 

So if pushing up your billing cycles earlier are out of the question, what would I move up and mail by Friday?

Customer acquisition efforts, certainly.  While it's true that everybody is pushing hard this week to get in the mail, you still should try to get all completed mail into the mailstream by Friday.  The rationale is that your names will be a couple of days fresher and, because you've targeted your mailing carefully (right?), you'll still stand out in the mail stream against some of the less-targeted efforts your prospects will receive.

Dunnings, particularly later ones.  Once you're 2 or 3 deep in your dunning series, there's not a lot of risk of payment crossover.  Once you've put the customer into a stop-ship status, feel free to mail earlier.  How much earlier?  Assuming you've got 3 or 4 weeks between dunnings, I'd feel comfortable pushing up the next 2 to 3 weeks of dunnings into the mail.  You might even find--as I have--that you might even want to roll out more aggressive dunning timing.

Bookmark to:

A quick reminder that U.S. postage rates are going up on May 12th, with First Class postage going up by one cent to $0.42.  The new rate schedule is available here.

Drop your mail before May 12th, if possible, but please don't rush.  Never is the phrase "penny wise, pound foolish" more appropriate than when dealing with rate increases.  A rush to mail and save a few dollars per thousand should never take precedence over ensuring your promotion is strategically sound and with clearly-defined objectives.

My recommendation is that you always have both an employee on staff who's familiar with the domestic mail manual (DMM) and have a trusted consultant or vendor available with whom to review upcoming changes in rates and specifications.  Creative thinking from a couple of different points of view can often be helpful when working with the DMM.  And please don't hesitate to contact the USPS and work with your local rep.  Their business, after all, is to help you use more of their services and I've found my account reps to be very helpful in many areas.  (Alas, rescinding rate increases was one where they couldn't help, despite my pleading.)

Given the timelines associated with direct mail testing, you should be working right now to get ahead of the round of changes, so you're ready to roll out lighter, more machinable or cheaper mail based on tested results.

Bookmark to:

And sometimes I just shake my head. My apparently never-ending stream of poorly executed direct mail continues, with the latest effort being a shockingly bad example from Marriott's Fairfield Inn and Visa.  It appears to be the result of a co-op promotion, which may account for the execution; nobody at either Marriott or Visa felt they were responsible for the results of the effort, and it shows.

For the record, the family and I are fans of Fairfield Inns and signed up for Marriott's Rewards program as the result of numerous stays at their Hazelton, PA location.  The staff is always great, the rooms clean and cookies and DVD movies are always enthusiastically offered to us when we check in at 9 or 10 pm the Tuesday evening before Thanksgiving.

Now, if only those responsible for their direct response efforts could feel the same enthusiasm.  Rather than rant and rave, here's a PDF file of the quick analysis I've sent to Marriott's marketing team.

Bookmark to:

After lashing out at Verizon and Vonage a little while ago, I thought I'd move on to other topics.

But Verizon can't help but make simple mistakes in their direct mail efforts.  On Friday, I received yet another first-class mailing, this time promoting Verizon's FiOS Internet service.

Since I've now been a triple-play customer for two months and paid two bills for the service, this mailing is slightly redundant.  Unlike the last promotion, this one has doesn't even include a letter signed by an identifiable person.  I guess they knew this was so poorly done that nobody wanted to sign it?

Of interest is the fact that the return address for the FiOS Internet service is Annapolis MD, while the TV promotion came out of Irving, TX.  This confirms my suspicion that the FiOS product is multiple business units hammered together.

Summary and takeaways

1. Share your internal customer lists across multiple business units and suppress against those customer files when you are undertaking a promotion.
2. Always suppress against your transactional/payment database.  Your internal marketing databases might not be updated, due to either sloth or neglect, but the department that counts the money always knows who's paying and who's not.

Bookmark to:

For the first time in a long time I took a few minutes to run through the Valpak co-op mailing I received last week.

After a few minutes of looking at the offers, I came up with a short list of things to consider if you're using Valpak (or other co-ops) as a marketing channel.  The short list is powered by my own past experience and might stimulate you to think of some other ideas.

Before I get started, here's a rundown of what I found inside.  There was a total of 43 inserts inside the envelope (which featured, bizarrely, a promotion for the television program CSI: NY on the OE and which distracted me from the 1:50,000 possibility that there might be a check for $100 inside).  I sorted the inserts into three categories:

1. National advertisers (19, 44% of the total).  These included Netflix, DirecTV, Verizon, Omaha Steaks and others.  Of those, 4 (27%) of the inserts did not use the standard 8 1/4" x 3 1/2" format and instead paid additional for a heavier and/or different stock insert.
2. Regional/franchise (8, 19% of the total).  Included here were ads for the local Gold's Gym, Kaiser Permanente and Molly Maids.  Of these, only 1 (12%) of the inserts deviated from the standard insert.
3. Local advertisers (15, 35% of the total). These ranged from local dentists to home improvement providers to Anthony's, a restaurant down the street--which included some coupons that might finally get me to take the family there!.  Only 1 insert (7%) strayed from the Valpak standard format.

Valpak ran one house insert, promoting an offer of $350 to target 10,000 homes for new advertisers, a CPM of $35.

We can immediately see some ideas, just from this basic sort.

The national advertisers, who have the biggest budgets for testing, are behaving differently than the smaller advertisers.  They are much more likely to use a heavier or different-sized insert than the local advertisers.  This is a great idea, as those ads, including ones from Dunkin' Donuts, Discover Financial Services and Netflix were more likely to fall out and be noticed.  As those ads were also larger, they had more room for promotional and offer copy and, in the case of Discover, provided a full credit card application.

Very smart and our key takeaway from the national advertisers: Don't be afraid to ask for and pay for extra weight and different formats.  In a cluttered environment such as a Valpak envelope, it's critical you stand out because you've only got seconds before the promotion is trashed.

I did see some flaws with the national advertisers.  While Omaha Steaks--a quality direct response marketing-led organization--provided a promotion with strong offer and call to action, Verizon provided a piece completely devoid of an offer. (See my Featured article on Monday to see more about Verizon).

While the local advertisers tended to use the standard Valpak format, I noticed that they were much more likely to have heavy use of offer- and benefit-laden copy.  Words such as "Free" and coupons (complete with dashed lines) featuring the savings amounts were very common.

On the other hand, the local advertisers creative tended to be weaker.  They were somewhat more cluttered and, in some cases, it was difficult to see the offer pop from the page.  This is possibly the case of the advertiser trying to save money on creative by either using a Valpak standard format or using a very inexpensive agency.  The takeway here is don't scrimp on the creative, once you've taken the plunge to buy the media provide a compelling offer.

When was the last time you looked through your co-op mailings or Sunday supplements?  Taking a few minutes to sort through them might help you uncover some interesting new ideas for those media or for others.

Summary and takeaways

1. Vary the stock and size of your promotion when in a competitive environment like a co-op mailing.  While it will cost you more, it's even more important that you stand out in these types of media due to the low open rates.  Check your competition and test what you've seen them do.
2. Don't scrimp on the creative.  Yes, it's a low-response medium, which means that you've got to watch the costs closely, but because of the short attention span it's critical that you don't hide your offer by making it difficult for the prospect to quickly see what you're offering.
3. Test two inserts.  None of the advertisers in this mailing had two pieces, but I've seen strong success by inserting two pieces.  Best of all--if you can manage it--is two inserts of unique size/shape/weight, at the front on either side.  You'll pay significantly more for this trick, but it almost always pays for itself, as you'll got noticed regardless of which side the prospect looks at first.

Bookmark to:

The site build is progressing well today. The CMS platform is up and stable, although page load times aren't acceptable yet and a few things are being examined on the server side.

We've installed a number of plugins to give us more flexibility when adding content. One we're experimenting with now allows easy addition of YouTube and other videos. And who would be more appropriate to test this with than the immortal David Ogilvy?

This video looks to be from the 80's when Mr. Ogilvy was serving as the chairman of O&M in India. If you happen to know the audience this was filmed for, I'd appreciate your feedback.I'll have more on Mr. Ogilvy and others in the future, but for now I bring you David Ogilvy in his own words, on the differences between general advertising and direct response and his advice to general advertising agencies.

Bookmark to: