Direct Marketing Days NYC 2000
The “e-” prefix firmly attached itself to this year’s Direct Marketing Days in New York, where direct response pros from dozens of industries gather for an ever-lengthening shindig at the Hilton each May. Indeed, d-marketing gave way to e-marketing as fifty percent of the sessions were devoted to aspects of the online world, from “How to Translate Classic DM Creative Techniques to the Web,” to “Successful Web Prospecting and Retention.” That didn’t mean that at the accompanying exhibition there weren’t the requisite envelope sales guys (where else would you score a package of white “number 10s” as a giveaway?), the credit and collection agencies, and of course, the post office — US, Canadian, English, and German. These old-line marketers, however, are clearly fighting a losing battle. The Direct Marketer of the Year was AOL’s President of Marketing Jan Brandt — once an employee at Newfield (Weekly Reader) Publications; last year it was Priceline’s Jay Walker, coincidentally also an ex-book continuity guy — while the opening day luncheon speaker was not even a marketer, but a futurist: James Canton of the Institute for Global Futures.
Though the “clubs and continuity” panels that used to be dominated by Time-Life, Newfield, Book-of-the-Month and others have been given over to abstractions like “affinity marketing” and “back-end analysis,” there was a notably stronger showing of publishing types at the podium than in recent years. Seth Godin, onetime book packager and bestselling author, gave a keynote address asserting that “Success Online is a Ten Letter Word” (all together now, starting with a “P”). Reader’s Digest’s Tom Ryder spoke to a full house on the second day of the conference, highlighting his achievements since taking over as CEO. He singled out the books division as an area of growth, mentioning Books Are Fun as a “fabulous business,” with 19 million books and gifts sold last year through 60,000 schools, as well as hospitals, businesses, etc. He called condensed books a “wonderful business for us,” and promised more books in each of the categories (home, health, family, faith, and finance) that RD is targeting. Some observers expressed skepticism about the company’s forward-looking agenda, however, noting that the CEO presented his grand vision in what can only be described as a dressed-down Word slide show. Power Point, what’s that?
Two marketers from BN.com were on hand, one speaking about catalogs as a feeder to the company’s website, while the other, Roe Johnson, presented BN.com as “An E-Mail Marketing Case Study” where new-offer tests, emails targeted to customers’ buying patterns, and customer retention efforts are the order of the day. She described the 100 million emails they will send out this year, not to mention the 100+ “BN Insider” newsletters they will generate for various segments of the buyer and registrant list. Many of these are co-branded, with the affiliate getting a percentage of any subsequent sales. Then there’s the MyBNlink service, which allows companies without a website to become an affiliate, and is BN.com’s fastest growing program. Meanwhile, efforts to coordinate the catalog, online, and in-store buying patterns of individual customers are in the works. Even rival Amazon.com hasn’t had to tackle that database dystopia.
When all was said and done, the stats showed a deep divide between traditional direct response companies and their web-only, VC-funded cousins. The average customer acquired by direct mail costs $71, while one acquired by email (whose lists are costly and whose customers loathe spam-like mail) runs a whopping $286. Yet online companies throw 55% of their email marketing budget at acquiring customers, and spend only 45% on customer retention. Meanwhile, traditional marketers spend only 12% on email acquisition, and 88% on retention. Email retention (which costs as little as $2 per customer) also offers companies opportunities to upsell, cross-sell, and introduce viral marketing initiatives. Flonetworks’ Regina Brady estimates that a graphically enhanced message to a customer can achieve an astounding 85% click-through rate, and a 16.5% pass-along rate.
But the biggest stat to come out of the conference — in case it’s not obvious yet — 5.4% of the rest of your life will be spent online, with 8 – 9 months of that spent reading email.
