7 Ways to Maximize Fulfillment and Collateral Pieces for Profits

 My latest article in Target Marketing...

Sure, fulfillment and inserts aren't as sexy as other forms of marketing, but they can be viable ways to bring in steady, ancillary revenues.

I've seen some online publishers bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars with a carefully thought-out insert program. For instance, taking a direct mail control piece and adding it in customer fulfillment packages as an insert. A no-brainer, right?

Wrong! You'll be surprised how many businesses are leaving money on the table by not doing this.
Are you leveraging your fulfillment kit? Do you have a strategy for your inserts?


Here are some simple ideas, when applicable, for print and electronic fulfillment that help encourage sales (cross-sells) and help customer lifetime value:

1. Personal Welcome or Thank You Letter (whether it's for newsletters, products or services. It could highlight all products OR current top sellers). This is the first thing a new customer will see. Make sure it is written in a personal, comfortable tone—welcoming the customers and reiterating what a good decision they just made and thanking them for their purchases. You can also add a little verbiage about your core values and what makes you unique in the marketplace. Be sure to reiterate any product guarantees you have, as well as customer service contact information.
2. Cross-marketing Piece. This can be a current direct mail piece edited for insert purposes. A flier highlighting a current hot product OR a natural, synergistic upsell from the product ordered. Or a "customer favorites" catalog. This encourages continued purchases now and down the road.
3. Coupon or special discount offer. (or if electronic, coupon/promo code for online ordering). Consider offering a special "thank you" coupon or a "share this with a friend/family member" coupon for additional sales and viral/word of mouth marketing.
4. Free Sample. (Women may remember Avon used to include tiny little lipsticks or perfume with their order. This approach can be translated in most any business—it could be a small, economy/sample size product, a bonus report, or more. Customers love, love, love freebies!
5. Renewal at Birth. This is a popular publishing term. If you're selling a subscription service or continuity program, you can include a renewal order form with your first issue at a special early discount rate.
6. Packing Slip. Many people overlook this fulfillment piece, but it can be used for more than printing out what is being sent to your customer. You can print your return policy/instruction on this piece of correspondence, as well as adding several product return reasons to help evaluate customer satisfaction and product refinement, going forward.
7. Feedback/Testimonial Form. Have a form to solicit customers' feedback and testimonials. This information could be priceless, as far as customer service, marketing, and new product development. Make sure your testimonial collection process is compliant so you can use stellar comments in future marketing efforts.

As most direct response marketers know, the first zero to 30 days is when a customer is red hot—as legendary entrepreneur and best-selling author of, "Ready Fire Aim," Michael Masterson, would say—in their "buying frenzy." So don't leave 'em cold. Give them cross-sell and upsell options.
Leverage this timeframe with your communications and turn your fulfillment pieces into another way to increase sales and relationship-build with your customers.
You may just turn on an additional revenue stream for your business!

The Empty Seat at the Table

There could be an important person missing from your senior management/executive team meetings.  I’ll give you a hint: this person is responsible for driving the strategic plan to grow loans and other key performance indicators for your credit union.  This person has invaluable feedback when it comes to opportunities for growth, process improvements, new product and service recommendations, and ideas to get the staff more engaged. 

Pssstt…it’s the marketing person. 

If this seat is empty at your institution, I urge you to reconsider the merits of why your marketing vice president/manager/director/department head hasn’t been included in meetings thus far.  It may be because their schedule is already so packed that you couldn’t possibly ask him or her to sit in on another meeting.  Or perhaps there is the perception that a lot of the conversation at these meetings is operational and therefore doesn’t apply to marketing. 

Ahhh…but that is EXACTLY why your marketing person should be included in these meetings.  If you have a seasoned marketing exec, their insights into industry and institutional trends, ROI, staff culture, and organizational goals will not only enhance the meeting as they are the most knowledgeable about potential growth opportunities inside and outside the institution, but it will help to make the marketing efforts that much more successful if this person is very well informed about all aspects of the organization.  If, perhaps, you have a less experienced marketing person at the helm, what better way to help them grow than to expose them to the whole of the organization so they can be more knowledgeable about, for example, why loans need increased, who a good target market will be for a campaign, and how that affects the bottom line?

Marketing is the engine that drives all of the operational goals.  For example, how is ROA increased?  Pinpointing the exact opportunities within your membership/customer base for potential growth and pulling various tactical levers to achieve growth in loans, deposits, products per member and retention.  Marketing isn’t about pretty postcards and banners on the website.  Marketing is born out of the strategic goals - and even challenges – for your institution. 

The results of including this person in your senior leadership/executive team meetings are twofold.  As stated above, it will only increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and growth in your institution’s key performance indicators.  The goal of any organization should be to grow and challenge its people and give them opportunities for advancement.  Including the marketing department head will also challenge and grow this person – regardless of tenure- and make them more loyal to your institution, which saves you money long-term as well.

If your financial institution is already including your marketing VP/Director/Manager in these meetings, then I would like for you to give yourself a big pat on the back!  Way to go! 

And, if you find yourself in the latter category, it’s not too late!  Go ahead - the rewards significantly outweigh the risks!  You will be on your way to even more amazing growth and success in the future while also having a more well-rounded employee that is a loyal spokesperson for your organization both inside and out.

 Amanda

We bring these philosophies to credit unions and community banks all over the country to help them with their strategic planning, marketing, and branding initiatives.  Contact me to learn more about how MarketMatch can help your financial institution define its "why" and achieve sustainable growth in the future.  Don't forget to ask about our ROI Guarantee - the only guarantee of its kind in the entire financial industry!

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What it takes to be Carnac the Magnificent.

As marketers, we are always looking into our crystal ball, reading the tealeaves and flipping the tarots. 

Whatever it takes to be the industry's Carnac the Magnificent.

"Who needs our product?  Who will buy?  What will they buy?  When?"  

As we discussed on August 12, a great deal of focus in the magical, mystical world behind the marketing curtain is spent in segmentation. The scientific and not-quite-so-scientific methods of running human being's through a filter to better manage our time and monitory resources.

Recent blogs have yakked about segmentation from topics like: 8 life stages that you should market to and Mirror Modeling and Birds of a Feather methodologies. These are all great ways to plan for today and the near future. (And they're absolutely brilliant prose!)

But how can you look a bit further out? Elementary, my dear Marketer ... watch the schools.

The 2004 NEA research paper, K–12 Education inThe U.S. Economy: Its Impact on Economic Development,Earnings, and Housing Values, discussed these findings:

"With regard to effects on economic development, one statistical study found that cutting statewide public K–12 expenditures by $1 per $1,000 of state personal income would reduce the state’s personal income by about 0.3 percent in the short run and by 3.2 percent in the long run. They also note that another study found that such a cut would reduce the state’s manufacturing investment in the long run by 0.9 percent and manufacturing employment by 0.4 percent. Similarly, another researcher found that a decline in educational quality, as measured by a 10 percent drop in standardized test scores, would lead to a 2 to 10 percent reduction in home values.They also cite a study that found a 10 percent reduction in school expenditures could yield, in the long run, to a 1 to 2 percent drop in post school annual earnings."

My simplistic, "If-Then" interpretation: When schools are managed poorly and/or necessary levies are routinely voted down - the level of education suffers. When the education suffers - people choose to move other places. When people move other places - so do business. When businesses move - so do jobs ... then the community truly can't afford the levies to fix the schools and the snowball gets bigger.

So, when you're trying to decide where to build a branch, or what region of your footprint should demand your attention, or where the future opportunity is ... of course, look at the current demographics, employment and economy ... but also look at the schools. They hold the key to every city's future.

We bring these marketing philosophies to credit unions and community banks nationwide, and would love to bring them to your institution too. Contact us to see how.

With more than 255,000 visits worldwide, we hope that you enjoy this blog.  If you find it helpful, please share it with your colleagues. Also, check out our YouTube Channel for short video blogs about financial marketing.  

MarketMatch is also a nationally and internationally requested speaker. Contact us to bring our marketing ideas to your next conference.

Here are the conferences where you can find MarketMatch.

See our story here. (click)

Chat with me LIVE! (click)

Or email me directly (click)

937-426-9848

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B2B Marketers, Be Careful What You Ask For

For the past few years, B2B marketing thought leaders and practitioners have been advocating that marketing should play a larger role in the demand generation process. Proponents of this view argue that marketing should have the primary responsibility for acquiring new sales leads via inbound and outbound marketing programs and for nurturing and qualifying leads until they are ready to begin a meaningful engagement with a sales rep.

According to its advocates, this model of demand generation is more consistent with how today's business buyers learn about issues and possible solutions and make buying decisions, and it also uses a company's demand generation resources more effectively and efficiently.

While the arguments supporting this demand generation model are compelling, implementing it will constitute a major change for many B2B companies. To understand how just big the change is, we only need to look at where leads are coming from today.

The following table is based on the annual Sales Performance Optimization surveys conducted by CSO Insights and includes data from the survey results published in 2011, 2012, and 2013. The survey question asked respondents to specify what percentage of their sales leads are self-generated by sales reps, what percentage are generated by marketing, and what percentage originate from other sources. As the table shows, B2B companies are still relying on salespeople to generate almost half of all new sales leads.



 

The distribution of lead sources shown in the above table has been fairly stable now for several years. The following chart is also based on data from the Sales Performance Optimization surveys and shows the percentage of total leads generated by marketing from 2005 through 2013. As the chart shows, marketing has been producing between 24% and about 30% of total leads for the past seven years.



 

The CSO Insights data makes two important points. First, it clearly shows that B2B marketers will need to "step up their game" if they want marketing to take the lead in lead generation. They must be ready to demonstrate to senior company leaders that they have a strategy that will produce enough sales-ready leads to enable their company to achieve its revenue goals.

 

Perhaps more importantly, the CSO Insights data makes it clear that successful lead generation will require the involvement of both marketing and sales (and other business functions as well), at least for the foreseeable future. Even if marketing significantly increases its lead generation results, it is likely that, for the next few years anyway, between 40% and 50% of leads will still be produced by sales reps and other sources.

TILT: What Advance Readers Are Saying

TILT comes out in just over two months. Here's what some advance readers are saying:

We have all experienced the thrill of impulse buying; being in the mall or your favorite store ready to buy the items in hand that you went in for.  And then you see it.  A pair of shoes on a display; that new suit you’ve been eyeing for 25% off; a new appliance.  For most, that thrill lasts until the bill comes, and then reality sets in about how this unexpected purchase will affect the budget for weeks or even months to come.

For the purposes of this post, agility and being able to make adjustments quickly is a given for credit unions and banks.  We have to make decisions about liquidity, rates, and many other things on a regular basis.  I’m talking about the super huge decisions that set the course for future decisions and results.

In business, the result of “impulse” decisions can be detrimental to the future direction of your financial institutions.  There is always a new piece of technology, a cool marketing trend, and more people to serve.  Decisions about these and other things set (or change) the trajectory of your organization, and you want to make sure that these choices are all pointed toward the same end goal…your why.

Your “why” is why your business operates, and how it operates differently than everywhere else.  Your why is the reason you and your staff members choose to work in YOUR institution. 

It takes a lot of patience to find your why, and even more to stick with it.  Once you define your why, it is important to weigh against it every choice about product suite, target market, branch location, and even staffing to make sure that you are keeping your compass pointed toward that ultimate goal you set as an organization.

I am working with a client that has spent the last three years patiently doing the work to define the credit union they want to be, performing market research to determine who they are best-suited to serve, and getting their data processing and other systems in place FIRST to be able to start serving those members now. 

What has impressed me over and over about this credit union is their fortitude and vision to pass on pulling that lever in order to achieve short-term successes on their balance sheet.  They wanted to get everything right first in order to set themselves up to have a truly unique culture and sustainable growth in the future. 

The patience that this credit union has had during this process is a virtue that has guided and will continue to guide them on the road to success.  Like we say in our office, there are a million things you could do, but a successful business chooses the few things they should do in order to have the biggest impact.

Amanda

We bring these philosophies to credit unions and community banks all over the country to help them with their strategic planning, marketing, and branding initiatives.  Contact me to learn more about how MarketMatch can help your financial institution define its "why" and achieve sustainable growth in the future.  Don't forget to ask about our ROI Guarantee - the only guarantee of its kind in the entire financial industry!

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Great Marketing: It Slices, It Dices...

Hey, friends. Are you tired of your marketing budget getting slashed every year? Are you embarrassed because your CEO looks at Marketing as the Arts and Crafts Department? Well friends, have I got the answer for you…

The Seg-O-Matic … It slices, it dices, it improves your response and blows up your ROI.


Alright, I know I sound like a bad '70's, Ron Popeil infomercial. But, hey ... that cat knew how to sell!

Seriously, folks ... segmentation is all about slicing and dicing. Here's an example:

We have a client who is rolling out a new interest checking account. Like many other smaller institutions, they previously only offered Free Checking and are now expanding their product line with the hopes of acquiring more checking, increasing retention and increasing services per household.

In the span of a 10 minute conversation, we had 7 target segments:

1. Members who qualify for new product - Move them into it
2. Members who qualify by balance but missing ancillary product - Motivate them to open more services to step into the new checking (this segment could have been more than a dozen individual segments is we focused on exactly what they were missing)
3. Those who are close in average balance - Increase balances/retention
4. Members who have required balance in deposits but no checking - New checking/retention
5. Non-checking with loans - New checking, focus on convenience of online banking
6. Non-checking without loans - New checking
7. Acquisition - Self explanatory (this could also be countless segments, but this SEG-focused institution has access to a very targeted list)

So there you have it, an instant strategy for product roll out by simply considering who the product affects, what each segment needs and what those needs have to offer to your objectives.

This client has fewer than 8,000 members, so it would have been easy to create a postcard to sound the trumpets and proudly proclaims the coming of "The Greatest Checking Account in the History of the World." (Could you hear the echo when you read that?!?!) 

We could have printed 8,000 pieces, used "Dear Member" as the salutation, mailed them out, sat back and counted new accounts. But our clients (and your members/customers) deserve better than that.

Segmentation goes far beyond the "haves" and "have nots." Consider your target's needs, how they use you and how you want them to use you. 

The more targeted you get, the more personal you get. The more personal you are, the better you can:

• Speak to specific needs
• Focus on specific calls to action
• Address different objectives in one campaign

The goal is to get as one-to-one as possible. In our example, there were only about 50 members who qualify for the account today. They could easily be called at home in a few hours.

Once you've sliced and diced and analyzed your segments, you'll have a better feel for what tactics you can use to communicate with each. Does your culture fit an external call effort? Can you trust your team to send personal letters? Can you create a process that looks more personal but still takes the responsibility off the front line staff? Should you?

I believe that everything can be prioritized. Once you have a feel for the quantities in each segment and how those segments like to use your institution, you can use this list as a guide:

Hierarchy of External Conversations

1. Personal phone call 
2. Personal letter from relationship manager
3. Postcard direct mail/email specific to the segment
4. Mass media

But Wait … There’s More!
How much would you pay to increase your response rates? 

But wait ... there's more!

Not only does the Seg-O-Matic give you personalized conversations and more meaningful calls to action ... it also allows for better campaign tracking. Yes, my friends, you get it all ... a one-to-one conversation, more objectives met, the power to know which segments respond and which you need to tweak.  Now how much would you pay?

But hurry, this strategy is not sold in stores. It's available to you only for a limited time. Call today!

For more lessons from infomercials click here.

We bring these marketing philosophies to credit unions and community banks nationwide, and would love to bring them to your institution too. Contact us to see how.

With nearly 255,000 visits worldwide, we hope that you enjoy this blog.  If you find it helpful, please share it with your colleagues. Also, check out our YouTube Channel for short video blogs about financial marketing.  

MarketMatch is also a nationally and internationally requested speaker. Contact us to bring our marketing ideas to your next conference.

Here are the conferences where you can find MarketMatch.

See our story here. (click)

Chat with me LIVE! (click)

Or email me directly (click)

937-426-9848

Follow me on Twitter @egagliano

How to Avoid Lead Genocide

Several days ago, I came across a great blog post by Jill Konrath. If you're not familiar with Jill's work, she is a well-respected sales consultant/trainer and the author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies.

In her post, Jill describes an experience with a provider of CRM software. You can read Jill's post to get the full flavor of the experience, but I'll provide an abbreviated version.

Jill received an e-mail from the CRM provider offering an ebook on the social sales revolution. Jill registered to obtain the ebook because she was interested in the topic. She had zero interest in acquiring a new CRM solution.

Just a few minutes after downloading the ebook, Jill received an e-mail from the CRM provider suggesting a "brief 10 minute call" to answer questions and "explain how our different products and services could bring value. . ." This call would help "shorten your evaluation process" and provide "exactly the information you need to help make any comparisons or decisions."

Exactly 34 minutes after this message, Jill received a second e-mail. The second message indicated that the sales rep had been unable to reach Jill by telephone and asked Jill to "let me know if it makes sense to connect." Two minutes later, Jill received a third e-mail asking her to answer nine questions regarding her CRM environment, including what she wanted her CRM system to do for her business, how many users she would have, and what other solutions she was evaluating.

Jill's post provoked numerous comments, and many of the people who commented said they had experienced something similar. One person said that she called this kind of marketing lead genocide rather than lead generation. I've had several experiences similar to Jill's, and I suspect many of you have also.

Practices like this are the epitome of bad marketing. In some cases, these aggressive practices may be the result of an honest, but mistaken, belief that just because a prospect has downloaded one white paper or ebook or attended one webinar, he or she is actively evaluating a potential purchase and is ready for a sales-level engagement.

More often, though, these kinds of practices result from an erroneous belief by sellers that they can push or drive or advance prospects through the buying process. The reality is, prospects control the buying process, and they determine how quickly they will move through the cycle. As I wrote in an earlier post, the only way you can consistently accelerate the buying process is to eliminate the friction that slows prospects down. Anything else is, at best, wasted effort, and it will usually do more harm than good.

To avoid the kind of marketing malpractice described in Jill's post, resist the urge to treat a prospect's first interaction with your business as an invitation to begin a late-stage sales conversation. And remember that, while you can facilitate your prospects' decision-making process, they ultimately decide when and to what level they will engage with your business.

An Inconvenient Truth About B2B Demand Generation

If you're a B2B marketer, describing the major attributes of your lead-to-revenue funnel and measuring the dynamics of your funnel are critical to understanding how well your demand generation system is performing. Funnel metrics will help provide the answers to three basic questions:

• Volume - Are our marketing programs generating a sufficient number of raw leads (sometimes called responses or inquiries) to produce the revenues that marketing is responsible for?
• Conversion - What percentage of leads are "converting" from each lead stage to the next across the entire lead-to-revenue cycle?
• Velocity - How long is the overall revenue cycle? In other words, now much time does it take, on average, for an initial response or inquiry to result in a closed sale?

Many B2B companies use the Demand Waterfall model developed by SiriusDecisions to describe and measure the lead-to-revenue funnel. The graphic below shows the major stages in the Demand Waterfall and the conversion rates achieved by average B2B companies, according to SiriusDecisions. (Note:  SiriusDecisions recently revised the Demand Waterfall to add several lead stages, but the framework shown below is still widely used by B2B companies.)

Now for the inconvenient truth. Research strongly suggests that the demand generation system in many B2B companies is horribly inefficient. Based on the conversion rates identified by SiriusDecisions, the average B2B company needs to generate 351 inquires to acquire one new customer. That equates to an overall lead-to-revenue conversion rate of only 0.3% (4.4% x 66% x 49% x 20%).

Forrester Research has found similar levels of demand generation performance. According to Forrester, the average overall lead-to-revenue conversion rate is 0.75%. What makes this issue important is that your overall lead-to-revenue conversion rate has a big impact on your company's overall cost of sales, which obviously affects company profitability.

 

The good news is that companies can significantly improve the performance of their lead-to-revenue funnel. In addition to identifying the lead conversion rates achieved by the average B2B company, SiriusDecisions has also studied the conversion rates achieved by Best Practice companies, and their research shows that Best Practice companies perform substantially better across the board. The table below shows how the higher conversion rates achieved by Best Practice companies impact lead-to-revenue funnel performance.

 

 

 

As this table shows, Best Practice companies must generate only about 70 inquiries to acquire one new customer, while average firms need five times as many. Best Practice companies also achieve an overall lead-to-revenue conversion rate of 1.4%, which is about five times higher that the rate achieved by average firms.

The performance of your lead-to-revenue funnel will tell you a great deal about the effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts. So, if you aren't currently using funnel metrics, now would be a good time to start.