Website design By BotEap.comWant to increase response on your B-to-B mailings? Do you need to enter new markets, find a new application for an existing product for a new audience? Need to communicate with hard-to-reach executives and get their attention? Do you need to increase your response rate to 300% while increasing ROI?

Website design By BotEap.comThe answers can be found with one of your suppliers, but it’s not your list broker, print shop or data processing shop, it’s your packaging producer!

Website design By BotEap.comThe average senior executive receives a minimum of 8,000 messages of various kinds a day, whether through passive billboards and building signage, emails, pop-up websites, product packaging on store shelves, television, radio background, newspapers and magazines, mail in the inbox and other sources.

Website design By BotEap.comIf you want your message to stand out, you better be prepared to do some homework on your target audience and give them something they’ll remember and find actionable.

Website design By BotEap.comOne of the best ways to show that you really know your target audience is to send them something that they find valuable. Of course, you could send each of them a few hundred dollar bills in an envelope, and if the envelope looked like “spam” mail, the only one who would win would be the clever garbage man who sifted through the trash! Even if you send something that is exactly on the right track, you still have to get it to the recipient, and the recipient must find it intriguing enough to open it. They won’t find the value and all that research is wasted unless they get past the “messenger”.

Website design By BotEap.comStudies commissioned by a major mailing company and carried out by a well-known research firm (us) have revealed that increasing open rates has a direct correlation with sales transfer. You probably came to that conclusion yourself by simple instinct and deduction, but the study proves it beyond doubt. So now, based on that, the challenge becomes more basic: grab their attention and make it intriguing enough to make sure it opens and the sales follow. Well, not quite.

Website design By BotEap.comThe study of 50 senior executives at trading companies with more than 1,000 employees along the East Coast made it clear that while they would obviously have a better chance of buying something from a sale if they opened the package, those odds were only increased by an estimate. of 20% That increases your overall response by 0.05%; not much help.

Website design By BotEap.comOne of the most powerful drivers was branding: if they had heard about the company on the envelope, they were 65% more likely to open it than if it came from an unknown source. Previous studies had shown that it takes 5-8 repeat exposures to gain recognition from an unknown audience. So it would follow that if you submit your best and most effective article first, you have little chance of getting noticed. If you first warm up prospects to build awareness with simple brand-oriented messaging, your big guns have a better chance of being effective and well-received. Clearly, a deeper approach and a solid research-based plan are needed. No need to apply the wonders in one fell swoop.

Website design By BotEap.comThe most revealing statistic to emerge from the study was that of the outer packaging and its relevance to the goal. More than 85% of the executives in the study said they would be more likely to open an item if it was especially large, oddly sized, or appeared to have arrived via a delivery service other than the US Post Office. : FedEx, DHL, even UPS did better than USPS for conveying urgency. Some companies have gone to great expense to reproduce a fake FedEx envelope as a means of transportation with great initial success, but only for a short period of time, according to another telling statistic from the study. More on that later. These would have to be produced on a large scale to gain any price savings, and the nature of B-to-B marketing tends toward smaller mailing quantities, due to tighter targeting, reduced availability of good lists, and intelligence from market, and lack of labor. Do the necessary follow-up to close large-scale sales of high-value goods and services.

Website design By BotEap.comThe disadvantage of this approach is twofold:

Website design By BotEap.comFirst, the disappointment factor is very high: expectations are raised when the courier envelope appears on their desk, but upon opening it, they discover that they have been “tricked” by another irrelevant offer: in the trash.

Website design By BotEap.comThe second factor is the lack of replicability. If you have multiple executives on your list from the same company, spreading out the title selections to reach a broader spectrum within each company, at the same address, the reception will likely occur on the same day at the same time, depending on the nature of postal delivery and internal distribution schedules in large companies. The executives noticed that if someone lower on the organization chart than they also received one, it was considered less important than it seemed, and it went in the trash. A byproduct of this is that fatigue occurs very quickly, and the decline in response is at least as rapid: recipients are now wary of “fake FedEx” and more resistant to opening it than ever. In a sense, they are the antibiotic of the direct response world: they work very well for a short time, but the body builds immunity and becomes less and less effective over time. Our research shows that these packages are fatigued at an incredible rate, and the recovery rates for sending other offers in the mail are close to zero.

Website design By BotEap.comClearly, a better plan is needed. Now that we’ve outlined the challenge, we’ll need to address the strategic approach to overcoming it. When using dimensional mail, the lesson is “Keep the package promise.”