Doing More With Less

We were recently challenged by a client to take another look at the marketing plan we had just completed for them and presented to their entire sales organization with the goal of taking nearly 20% out of the budget without sacrificing any of the programs, the effectiveness and simply put, doing more with less.

While this was certainly not the first time we’ve faced the “do more with less” request over the past several months, this was probably the first time the expectations of performance were not negotiable. When we got over our initial “you gotta be kidding” reaction, we did sit down and take a very critical look at the plan and identify a few areas that could be restructured to maintain impact while reducing cost.

One of the primary things this or any client can do to reduce costs is move direct marketing efforts from print and post to online. It is amazing how dynamic and efficient these tools have become. We took our client’s direct mail list, worked with an email appending service to acquire the actual email addresses for approximately 60% of the client’s contact list and will be sending out a consistent campaign of messages throughout the year directing recipients to our client’s landing pages, website and contact information where we can track activity and attribute actual performance metrics to the campaign.

Even with the costs of the list appending, distribution of the emails through an appropriate service like our eMarketerPro and the time to coordinate the mailings and reporting, these campaigns will be less than 66% of the cost of a traditional direct mail campaign requiring printing and postage.

While the distribution list is about 60% of the size of the direct mail list, we fully expect the response rate and sales opportunities to increase given the difference in rates from traditional direct mail (1.5 – 2%) vs. email response marketing (6 – 8+%) .

That’s definitely doing more with less.