How to Acquire Profitable Customers Quickly

Modern Methods for Modern Direct Marketers

Shane Redding

A little bit about me

• IDM senior tutor and hon. Fellow• Consultant: www.ThinkDirect.biz • Love learning!

@shanerddng

Acquisition

• Getting new customers STILL the number 1 priority for marketers today*

• Paid media is still the most popular tool for acquisition, but “earned” or word of mouth (WOM) making big inroads

• Marketing budgets increasing as confidence returns

*Source: econsultancy Marketing Budgets Report 2014

*source: econsultancy Marketing Budgets Report 2014

So what?

• Planning for profit• Insight• Testing• Tools• Top tips• And where next?

Planning for profit

• Are you doing this?• Don’t just do what you’ve always done!• Adopt “team sky” approach• For really quick wins – planning is where you

need to spend the time!• So start with your existing customers, who is

making you money and who is not?

Insight

What are your customers doing and what are they saying?•Market research (what do they like?)

General www.trendwatching.com

Specific very fast research www.fastmap.com

•Database analysis (who and where are they?)•Campaign insight (what’s working)•Inbound “touchpoint analysis” from f2f sales to web

Campaign touch point analysis

Using inbound marketing automation (Hubspot) allows tracking by all

media

Campaign response by device

Testing

A forgotten art?

Where you take a control sample and test against it. Or do a split test (A/B)* •Great direct marketers test•They test the BIG things (DATA, media, copy, offer)•They allow 20% of their marketing budget for testing•They keep testing!

*http://www.dmnews.com/how-to-do-direct-marketing-testing/article/98111/

Tools

• Do marketers suffer with ADOS?

@skemmo describes "Attention Deficit ... Ooh Shiny! http://bit.ly/1iRrz7m • Focus! • What’s broken?• Integrate

Some quick wins

• B2B – use tools such as www.leadforensics to identify hot sales leads from your website

• H2H – integrate old methods (direct mail) with new tools:

www.hellomarket.co.uk

www.mytouchpoint.co.uk/tfma2014

Select prospect data

www.mytouchpoint.co.uk/tfma2014

Upload creative

www.mytouchpoint.co.uk/tfma2014

Choose templates and despatch

www.mytouchpoint.co.uk/tfma2014

Doing a lot with a little

It works!

Social WOM

Top Tips

• For PROFITABLE acquisition

“chase the winners”• Think SMART• Copy the best• Resource poor – recruit placement student or

apprentice www.apprenticeships.org.uk• Invest in yourself and your team – build

“T”alent and skill up

Where next?

• IDM courses and qualifications – full day on 17th March on Acquisition www.theidm.co/acq2

• www.marketingsherpa.com• www.fastcocreate.com • www.Cyance.com b2b case studies and

benchmark your data http://hub.am/1gdQlMs

and follow #idmb2btt

thank you