Timing Is Everything In Direct Marketing
You may have heard just the right words at just the right time to change the direction of your life. Your father may have told you to work on the timing of your swing. Or maybe you were just in the right place at the right time. Or worse, the wrong place at the wrong time.Timing is indeed everything.
And Time is the secret ingredient to help you win and retain customers.
What the Marketing Text Books Failed to Tell You
Old school direct marketing gurus often preach the 60-30-10 rule where the target database is worth 60% of the success of the campaign, the offer & message are worth 30% of the success of the campaign and the creative/media are worth 10% of the success of the campaign.
Generally speaking, they are right. But they leave out the all important element of time.
When you target the right people with the right message at precisely the right time you position your campaign for dramatically higher response rates while simultaneously spending less.
Your perfectly timed messages are insanely relevant for your target audience. And more importantly, you are not wasting a nickel on targeting the right people at the wrong time.
Breakthrough Idea of 2005: Harvard Business Review
In fact the Harvard Business Review said:
When is the New What... The din of marketing has escalated to a cacophony, with the whines of e-mails, phone calls, and direct mailings drowning one another out. But when customers actually require help or when their needs or desires change, they hear nary a peep from companies. That is because marketing organizations spend their time figuring out "whom" to target with "what" message but have largely ignored the question of "when."
You see, when you target a person that just bought a home with an offer for window coverings... or you target a person that filed a building permit with an offer for doors & windows.... or you target a new parent of their first child with an offer for life insurance... you are delivering marketing messages that are truly relevant to your target audience of one.... simply because your message is arriving at the time right before they make a big purchasing decisions in your product category.
Ethical Direct Marketing: Remarkable!
Is this an oxymoron? Ethical and direct marketing in the same sentence? Join us in saving our society, our planet and the souls of marketers everywhere.
Marketing at just the right time is a strategy of true 1:1 marketing where your message is relevant to the end user based on the event "trigger" that just occurred in their life (buy a house, have a baby, purchase a specific product). You are paying attention to what is important for your customer. And not pummeling them with irrelevant offers. Relevancy is ethical.
At the same time you are saving forests. The old way of marketing was to spend a boat load of money delivering hundreds of thousands of mail pieces to people you believed were prospects for your product or service based on some indirect demographic profile (i.e. age, income, etc.). The new way is to only mail a tiny quantity to just the right people at just the right time right before or after their event trigger.... rather than mailing hundreds of thousands, you only mail hundreds. You save money, you deliver relevant messages and you use less paper. Saving our planet's natural resources is ethical.
Timing is everything. Ask your Mom.