Direct Marketers Know More About Social Media Than You Think

Lately I’ve been thinking about what I learned over the course of 20 years in the direct marketing industry, with a mind towards understanding how those lessons can be applied to engage with customers and prospects in today’s Web 2.0 world…without the hard sell, non-permission approach. In the late 1980′s, I got an intensive education in the psychology of response while circulation manager on the launch team of what is now Health magazine, with Direct Marketing Association Hall of Famer, John Klingel, at the helm. We dropped over 12 million pieces of mail a year to reach our paid circulation goal of 250,000 in two years. The techniques we experimented with left me with some key understandings that are also inherent to social media. After all, human nature hasn’t changed; it’s just the playground that’s different.

Lesson 1: Involvement aids in the building of relationships

This is a lesson learned by those horrific “yes, no, maybe” stickers that we came to call involvement devices.  The mere act of engaging the customer to remove his or her sticker of choice from the outer envelope to apply to the order form produced greater response than a package without stickers.

Lesson 2:  People respond best to authenticity

We started to test a real stamp against what had long been used on the outer envelope, a postal indicia. The live stamp increased response pretty significantly. Our theory was that people associated the indicia with junk mail and the stamped envelope as  an authentic message directed at them personally.

Lesson 3:  People like to be acknowledged for their contribution

That vital first year at Health we addressed every subscriber as a “charter subscriber”. We sent them charter membership cards that gave them special privileges and our renewal efforts, which recognized their charter status, produced greater conversion than groups that followed.

Why are these lessons meaningful for direct marketers in today’s Web 2.0 world? Because they remind us that we understand the concepts that are vital to successfully engage with customers in Web 2.0 platforms. We just need to approach social media as tools for applying what we have learned about human behavior in a way that is acceptable to the tone of the Web 2.0 world.

Photo credit: holsro