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PORTFOLIO: DIRECT RESPONSE CREATIVE DELIVERS GREAT ROIs

A particularly effective form of marketing is called direct response (hereafter DR). As the name implies, DR is marketing directed right at its targeted prospects encouraging them to respond in a specific way. It is generally a proactive form of marketing meaning the seller is aggressively going after specific buyers rather than waiting for buyers to seek out the seller. As such, it tends to be much more successful at directly driving sales than many other forms of advertising & marketing.

You are experiencing variations of direct response marketing every time you open your mail or email boxes and find offers to buy a variety of products or services. You are watching direct response advertising when you see commercials pitching a product or service and concluding with a phone number and strong push to buy now. Infomercials, certain webinars and a variety of other mediums all become direct response creative when they cater to a targeted audience and encourage a specific action.

There Are Many Crucial Variables in Great Direct Response Marketing...

Here's a few of them:
  1. Narrowly targeting the prospects: a good amount of our DR work involves renting very specific lists of relevant prospects. There are multitudes of lists available in both the B2B and B2C spaces giving you the ability to easily put your offer in front of a very specific kind of potential buyer. Lists can be screened to narrow the target. For example, if you had a product suitable only for women, aged 25-40, with college degrees, health care occupations and living within 250 miles of a particular city(s), you can screen for all of that and much more. In doing so, you filter out the irrelevant (prospects that don't meet your ideal criteria) so that only your ideal prospects are going to receive your offer. This is far superior to typical (buckshot) advertising where you have to hope some of your target audience is watching or listening precisely when your ad happens to be running.
  2. Exceptional creative to pitch the product or service: DR creative must do many jobs. It has to establish you quickly, make your offering seem like a must have, build confidence in the prospect so they can trust your company, jack up perceived value so the subsequent offer appears to be a great bargain, etc. You are usually asking total strangers to be interested in your offering enough to open their wallets almost immediately after you first introduce your product or service to them. The creative is doing both the marketing & sales jobs. It must be exceptional!
  3. Call to action: the offer itself has a singular objective of moving the prospect to take action... NOW! Often this is a call to "buy now" via phone, Internet and/or mail. The offer will typically include multiple ways the prospect can respond and use a variety of shrewd tactics to motivate that response.
  4. Tabulation of results: the crucial step of measuring how each piece of creative performs determines the effectiveness of the creative. This is not just about counting total dollars made but also relative comparisons of creative vs. creative, targeted list vs. list, etc. Along with the revenues from the campaign many other important insights are realized and documented. The smart direct response marketer uses this knowledge to more effectively harvest additional revenues in subsequent campaigns.

What Goes Into Intelligently Executing Direct Response Marketing Campaigns?

There is a great deal of nitty gritty detail to doing DR campaigns right. For example, a crucial part of #1 is being very smart about how to minimize (marketing budget) risk. One piece of ideal execution is to apply statistical analysis using random samples of prospects from lists of prospects you can rent for promotional purposes. This sampling is used to determine which lists have tangible ROIs so they can be deemed worthy of a "roll." You want to roll to lists in their entirety only when they prove themselves to be profitable. You get that proof via statistical work on small random samples of much bigger lists. Instead of spending a lot of money to promote ALL of the prospects in every apparently-favorable list, we can use the science side of marketing to confidently project the strength (ROI) of complete lists by testing those small (& relatively cheap) samplings.

This is a popular penny-pinching tactic that minimizes risk while maximizing discoveries of new sources of buyers. Done well, you spend a fraction of the cost as opposed to promoting all of the individuals in all of the lists in hopes of ending up with a profitable result. More simply, you're not guessing about whether each list is good (profitable) or bad (not profitable). The samples objectively reveal that crucial information to you and you act (spend) accordingly. You don't risk your marketing budget on hope & luck; you use science to reduce your risk to near zero.

List rentals can involve any number of lists (from a single list to thousands of lists) with almost any number of prospects (from a small quantity of potential buyers to millions) at various rental rates per name (often a few cents per name to 30-40 cents or more). List brokers usually have some minimum quantities to make the list rental transaction worthwhile (no one has much interest in renting someone a list of 50 names at 25 cents per name for a total list rental cost of $12.50). List rental minimums are usually 1K-10K or more names depending on the list:

  • If you are quoted a list with a 5K minimum rental quantity at 20 cents per name, renting that minimum of 5K names is going to cost $1K.
  • A 10-list campaign in which all of the lists happen to share that same minimum & rental rate would cost $10K to promote those 50K names (10 lists of 5K names each).
  • A 100-list campaign with that same minimum & rental rate would cost $100K to promote 500K names.

Again, all of the lists relevant to your own offerings could rent for more or less than 20 cents each and/or could come with higher or lower minimum rental quantities. If you are interested in getting specifics for your own business, contact us for a free consultation and we can identify cost & minimum specifics for relevant lists of likely buyers of your own product and/or services.

Shrewd Moves: Using Statistical Sampling to Maximize Direct Response Marketing ROIs

For the sake of illustration of important opportunities in direct response marketing, let's imagine you want to target 2M prospective buyers in a 50-list campaign. We'll also assume an average rate of 20 cents per name and 5K list rental minimums. If you wanted to promote all 2M names in those 50 lists BLIND (no list sampling), you risk $400K (2M targeted prospects at 20 cents per name). It takes a lot of hope to back a $400K blind risk like that.

BI can show you the proper way to randomly sample the 50 lists. Doing so, you might be able to objectively determine the ROI of all 50 lists for around- say- approx. $50K instead of risking your entire $400K. If the test reveals that only 600K names in- say- 12 of the 50 lists are worth rolling, that roll will cost $120K and go out to ONLY those lists now proven to yield buyers at a very specific rate of conversion or better. Since we've also proven the other 1.4M prospects in the other 38 lists are NOT capable of delivering a satisfactory ROI (the other 38 lists out of that 50 are not profitable) on your offer, you don't waste upwards of $230K more promoting those weak-responding lists. You instead focus your cash resources on just the 600K out of that 2M total pool size that you now shrewdly target as your real opportunity. With this method you save that extra $230K on list rental expenses while maximizing your ROI on that entire (2M) pool of prospects. Very simply, you spend a lot less to harvest the profitable prospects from the overall opportunity.

Direct response marketing is efficient, narrowly targeted marketing that can yield huge ROIs On a macro scale of utilizing many lists for each campaign (and many campaigns each year), proven tactics like statistically sampling lists can add up to millions of dollars in savings over time. In the above example, it actually saves you more than you would expend to maximize your return on that particular 2M-person pool of prospects. Put such savings to good use by funding some extra campaigns and your revenue results go way up from the same money that would have otherwise been mostly wasted if you chose to hit all 2M names and just hope for the best.

If another block of 2M additional prospects could yield about the same level of conversions at about the same costs, that $230K you saved would fully pay for testing out that second block of 2M prospects too. In other words, instead of foolishly blowing $400K by promoting all 2M names in ONE blind campaign, that same $400K could have been used to promote only the worthwhile prospects out of the original 2M plus only the worthwhile prospects in up to another 2M pool and still leave a little surplus in your marketing list rental budget (to perhaps cover about 35% of your list costs in a THIRD 2M-prospect campaign). If your conversion rate turned out to be 1.5% overall, you would realize at least about 18,000 buyers over BOTH 2M-prospect campaigns funded by THE SAME MONEY, as opposed to wasting much of the $400K to get only around 9,000 buyers out of just ONE campaign. 18K buyers (with some budget left over) or 9K buyers (and all $400K spent)? Your choice is simple.

A multitude of "been there, done that" strategies employed by direct response experts like BI contribute to making intelligent use of your marketing budget. Cost-per-sale goes down while revenue-per-customer goes up. Working at both ends like that is the best way to improve your marketing ROI's. We can show you that money.

DR is one of our most potent specialties. Many new pieces we've created have outperformed the established control creative. A "control" is a piece of marketing that is currently the best-performing creative in use by the marketer. In direct response marketing models various versions of creative face off head-to-head against the established control. If a new piece of creative outperforms a control it is likely to become the new control against which subsequent new creative will compete. This cycle continually repeats as solid creative becomes control, tires over time and is then replaced by new, fresh creative that delivers better ROIs.

BI is a capable source of wow creative able to develop DR marketing that can knock established control off their perch. We've even beaten our own creations when asked to outperform control pieces developed by our own team. Try us. Any DR marketing model makes testing one source of creative against another a relatively easy affair. Let us demonstrate the BI difference in the most meaningful (and objectively measurable) way.

How Does BI Create High-Performance Direct Response Marketing?

We take on each project from scratch- no preconceived notions... no pre-fabricated bias. Every project is 100% unique. We do the hard work to uncover a fresh angle(s) or an entirely new theme. Because modern buyers want to be wowed, we apply 21st-century solutions to the task- not the "same old, same old" formulaic tactics from 5-10-20+ years ago. Our collective brilliance approach offers immense innovations because it brings the best of all 3 buyer impact dimensions into one powerful message. Since it is grounded in marketing science you don't have to lean on hope that our recommended hooks, etc, are sound. There's little marketing voodoo... just solid work yielding wow creative.

We blend quality messaging with eye-grabbing imagery to get the creative viewed and the desired "call to action" answered. The challenge of getting prospect attention and holding it is not to be underestimated. How many email promotions in your inbox this morning were flowed straight to your trash can without even a look? How many got a quick look and quickly followed the first group? How many actually pulled you in and got you to seriously consider whatever they were pitching? Did any get your credit card out of your wallet? We employ novel approaches to do well against such hurdles, motivating more prospects to take a serious look which is a first step toward getting the opportunity to close them.

Enormous passion goes into each new campaign as if we are creating a fine work of art. Years of highly-tuned experience is icing on the cake. For Internet promotions, we work in many mediums including email marketing, multimedia marketing, webinars, vodcasts, podcasts, infomercials, etc. For direct mail, we've developed short format, long format, #10, magalog, tabloid, bookalogs, etc. (we've done them all).

A few samplings from our portfolios can be browsed below. They illustrate how the messaging evolves to entice each audience and how the imagery adapts to titillate the imagination. All of these outperformed the previous controls at their respective companies. If you would like to see any of them in full (the actual piece of creative), just click the red button when it is on screen (note that some are larger files and may take a few minutes to download on slower connections). To move through this small sampling, hover over the image so that left & right arrow navigation appears. Click the right arrow to step forward through the samples...

Some BI Direct Response Portfolio Samples Value added creative that segs into a product pitch Magalog direct response pitching live seminars Direct mail promotion that sold a team of investor gurus web service Slim Jim format direct mail A direct response postcard pitching cosmetic dentristry services One page flyer advertisement for diet supplement One page advertisement for software Short-format print piece that sold an investor educational course Sales support creative used to extend the sales process, motivating more closes DirectResponseSamples-011 Fancy design HTML email creative to stand out from the inbox crowd Long format HTML email promotion Long format HTML email promotion Tri-fold print mailer selling DVD-based educational courses 24-Page Magalog selling mortgage broker educational services B2B Direct mail print creative selling a higher-priced monthly web service subscription for traders Sales support creative presenting an all-inclusive proposition in a single piece Contact BI for a FREE consultation


Along with developing the creative, BI can also help you manage the campaign from end-to-end. This can include sourcing the ideal lists to test (a massively important piece of good direct response marketing campaigns), setting up the test cells, executing the statistical testing phase of the campaign, measuring the results, recommending the lists that are roll worthy, executing the rolls and tabulating & documenting the final results. We can do all this cooperatively with your people or up to turnkey if desired.

We have an extraordinary mix of talent in our subcontractor network including premier, "A-list" copywriting & layout teams in both online and traditional mediums (some of the creative in the interactive slide show is from some of these teams). List specialists, mail & email services, creative packaging groups, fulfillment services, video & audio specialists, campaign management, etc.- whatever is needed for the kind of DR to be done, we likely have the very best talent on hand ready to make it happen for your company. Even if your current messaging is already doing well, we can help you aim higher. See the BI difference for yourself by testing us against your established control. If your business could benefit from fresh creative energy & experience, contact the Big Innovations team right now. We look forward to helping you find the next big thing.

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