In the often times set it and forget it world of brand advertising, this may not be seen as a big move. However, for direct response advertisers it provides a crack of daylight into this heretofore branded space. Having the flexibility to place shorter duration buys to determine response in this format, allows DRTV advertisers an entre’ into a medium that all but the largest DRTV consumers have deemed too risky. Time to Test!

Of course viewers can still skip thru the ads but that’s another story…

1,000 phone calls are great if you spent $10,000 in media ($10 cost per call). If you spent $100,000, then it’s not so good ($100 cost per call). Same thing with orders. 50 orders from 100 calls are great (50% conversion of calls to sales). 1,000 calls are not so great (5% conversion).

See how the perspective changes of what’s good, and how you can quickly start to see the gap, allowing you to brainstorm on ways to close the gap?

Seems simple, and something every direct marketer knows. However, I’m amazed at how many times I see people report numbers without applying this type of logic and statistics to their reporting and insight. Even direct marketers. They report conversion statistics on their front-end metrics, but then will state that returns on the back-end are 100 units. What? What percentage of customers are returning the product? That’s what you want to know.

My simple but golden rule as a mathematician and marketing analyst has served me well over the years:

Everything has to add up to 100%.

When confronted with numbers, I immediately look for the breakdown in percentages. And if the numbers don’t add up to 100%, there is usually a quality problem in the data that you have to fix first. If they do add up to 100%, then what are the interesting ratios and percentages that I want to eliminate or increase? Once I have these benchmarks, I can then start to compare this metric over time. Which is just another way of saying Trend Analysis.

I encourage everyone, when confronted with numbers, to try and apply this simple rule. It allows you to see the data in a new light, and ask the appropriate questions to give you the insight you are seeking from the data. And it is an easy QC process to ensure the data is even accurate to begin with.

Seems so simple. Try it. I’m guessing you will surprise yourself with the value you’ll see in catching bad data or bringing you a new insight.

So, how much credit went to our IVR and web teams for the conversion improvement? None. (Don’t worry, they get plenty of breakthroughs on their own.)

The power of direct response is once again proven to be held in an amazing equation – the relationship between product, price, offer, call-to-action, creative, media, and conversion.

Optimization of one area can only occur when you consider the impact of every decision as it relates to all areas.

We doubled conversion the other day on another campaign. Imagine how much more media can be purchased under the improved performance metrics?

In direct response, there isn’t anything that doesn’t affect everything. Are you testing the cross-functional levers? Are your campaigns integrated in a manner that cross-functional testing is possible?

In the business of direct response, the most interesting things happen where paths cross. Maybe ours will cross someday, as well?

In my opinion, social media should only be used to accelerate the momentum of your direct response campaign – it can’t be the driver of it. Really, social media should be viewed as a media channel opportunity combined with a customer service channel. I am not proposing you stick your head in the sand and ignore the existence of social media or facebook, but be realistic about what you can expect to achieve by engaging in it – it’s just the Web stuck inside a branded iFrame.

Facebook provides you a highly targetable advertising platform with (currently) relatively good economics. It should be used to supplement traditional advertising buys to ensure that the growing population of facebookers are exposed to your campaigns.

Facebook is growing in popularity as a mechanism for customers to connect with brands – don’t ignore this. Add facebook to your customer service models just as most firms have added email as a customer service channel.

Your chances of a viral video transforming the performance of your brand or social commentary causing a spike in sales is an un-scalable, unpredictable pipe dream for the vast majority of brands – don’t waste your time focusing on it. Instead use your expertise in marketing, conversion and customer service to leverage the social media platforms as a integral part of you conversion funnel and post-sale customer experience.

Radio is full of qualified, yet uneducated, callers. Once a consumer listens to a 60 second radio advertisement and places a call, they are able to retain an average of two pieces of information. First, of course, they know the phone number they need to dial. (Even that is fleeting.) Second, they know the reason they’re calling. In most cases of direct response radio, this is because one of the product’s benefits caught their attention and now they want their free trial, free quote or free demo. This is a reasonable expectation, but it means the responsibility for providing additional product information, enticing the caller with benefits and converting them at a profitable level, rests solely on the person or technology handling these calls.

Finding a knowledgeable sales-based call center agent became our priority. These agents were specially trained to know the product inside and out. They could probe and understand why the caller had interest in the product, and use that to begin their sales process, while providing offers and overcoming objections. These were specialized or dedicated agents. They made for a powerful tool in any direct response radio campaign but, being specialized, these agents adapted and succeeded within the specific limits of one product. Also, by their nature, these agent groups are difficult to find and a challenge to scale.

To combat these challenges, over five years ago, Marketing Architects combined persuasion and technology to launch its Vocé sales platform. Similar to these dedicated call center agents, Vocé could provide product information and be persuasive in its sales flow helping callers to become buyers. It is also easy to set-up and instantly scalable.

For a direct response radio caller, it’s important to make it easy for the caller to say “yes”. A smart sales flow stair-steps from a low-risk and low-cost offer up to one that requires more investment but includes incentives as a reward for purchase.

Radio is a targeted channel, giving you access to some of the most valuable consumers out there. Whether you use a live agent or a technology, you’ll find that being informative and persuasive and reducing or eliminating the caller’s risk in purchasing your product, direct response radio can be one of the highest converting channels in your portfolio.

If I never had to talk about social media again, I’d be a happy direct marketing leader. If felons would stay out of this business … if media companies would stop selling smoke and mirrors … if false promises and platitudes were for back office conversations, not mainstream direct response campaign dialogues …

If only … If only the scrappy entrepreneur still had a chance to make it big in the Direct Response industry, when we all know they don’t, unless we re-invent what we do for them – fast.

If only I were not so skeptical of the industry I’ve been in for 25 years. But boy, do people contact our firm with their heads filled with crazy stuff propagated by a large number of firms in this industry.

On a practical level, if only there was a unified viewpoint on Direct Response TV success, with standards and practices that leaders in this industry must provide to truly help guide the entrepreneur to success.

We bought a defibrillator awhile back, and a few key people in our office are trained to use it the same way. I suspect from the training we received, most offices operate theirs in the same manner. So what does the heart have to do with DRTV? I get too many calls each week from people who are trying to break into this industry, with their heads filled with outrageous advice. The advice is all over the map, and self-serving to the advisor at that. Imagine if using the defibrillator were that confusing? Yes, hopefully it’s never needed inside our office walls. But you know your direct marketing campaign is going to need it. Many times.

So how do you jump start the heart of a Direct Response TV campaign? Talk to a media company, and it’s the deal, stupid. A production house. And it’s go big or go home. Web, it’s the analytics. Call centers, your agents. Payment gateways, it’s processing. You can get media funding at 200% annual interest rates, if you beg long enough. Source from China, but give an arm and a leg for initial inventory.

Everyone wants a piece of the start-up, and will promise the moon to get it. But then they deliver moon rocks. And you won’t find your way through the night with those. Advisor by advisor, the Direct Response entrepreneur has been getting sickening guidance. Along the way, their ability to achieve dreams died. And nobody is talking about it.

The language is now about 1 to 1 ratios. But that is nowhere close to covering your costs. Talk has turned to brand building. Lift to web. Drive to retail. You won’t hear talk about making a profit on TV any longer. So who’s got the funding to make the loss leader approach work? Not the entrepreneur. Big companies do. Run by MBAs and financial dudes. Deep pockets and deep voices to go with them. But, that’s no fun at all. No heart or soul. No passion required to work at those places.

Profits out of the gate are what the entrepreneur needs to survive. 2 to 1 MERs. 3 to 1 MERs. More. They still happen within our walls. Often.

Success, not excuses. Guidance and vision, not false promises and generalities. Skin in the game? We give it. The entrepreneur needs it. And working with crazy, passionate founders is what it’s all about, for me.

Profit-centric Direct Response TV campaigns … want some? We have some. Many actually. But don’t bring an industry bias. We are working on Direct Response TV 2.0, and it’s nowhere close to the model of the last 25 years for me. And no, social media is not the driver of success. Profits are. That funds the dreams of entrepreneurs.

We recently took this learning and applied it to a demographic that we have not traditionally targeted – the elderly. I have been reading lately about the shifting demographic of internet usage, specifically social media platforms like FaceBook™, and it is clear that the post-retirement U.S. population is both growing in number as well as the proportion of them that are active on the internet. We recently ran a market test for a mobility device, and to our surprise we achieved a 63% response rate directly attributable to the web. We also saw double digit web conversion rates during that same period. 

It is somewhat of a holy grail for us to be able to match stellar toll free number conversion rates using Voce with a rocking web conversion platform.  We have since established an aggressive target of 40-60% of all orders attributed to the web. We are confident that we will get there with hard work, tenacity and lots of multivariable conversion funnel analysis.

In a multi-channel marketing campaign leveraging radio, television, print and web, it becomes critical to correctly attribute the campaign impressions and sales so that channel performance can be established, measured and improved. Being an Accountable Direct Response  TV and Radio agency, it is always our preference to be using well-defined methods for measuring the efficiency of media and creative. Recently, though, we ourselves have been experiencing the challenges that this can create when launching fully-integrated campaings.

A commonly discussed metric is the volume of sales coming from the web as a response mechanism compared with the volume from Toll Free Numbers (TFN) that are attributable to Direct Response TV.  We have seen time and time again that consumer behavior is shifting towards using the web as a preferred response channel.  They are searching for both information and a buying experience online, rather than simply being compelled to pick up the phone.

This shift to the web as both an information resource and as a direct purchasing mechanism introduces a challenge for response attribution of Direct Response TV campaigns. Traditionally, unique TFNs are used to identify specific media and creative intersections, enabling traffic spike matching to media schedules. On the web, organic search has become the rule.  A large proportion of people no longer enter a URL into a browser address bar.  Instead, they enter text into a search bar. Winning this search result has now become critical for capturing the web response from your Direct Response TV campaigns. If you choose to use multiple campaign microsites, or unique URLs for each creative, this simply increases the challenge.  You now must ensure the each URL and branded message is “Won” in search.

Today, integrated campaigns supported by a single agency that can effectively merge all media traffic have the advantage.  It becomes much easier to directly attribute the success of each activity; blending together the results of each channel to see the overall campaign performance. This, however, is rarely the environment in which many advertisers land.

Although the single silver bullet has yet to be found, the challenge forces innovative Direct Respsonse agnecies to think like a customer and to understand the need for rapid results. Traditionally, most of the industry has operated under the belief that attempting to glean insights by analyzing results on a week-by-week basis was sufficient. I am thankful that Marketing Architects thinks differently on this topic. We believe in the power of rapid results analysis.  Being able to see response traffic variations rapidly allows us to rebalance campaign spends across channels, as well as providing our advertisers with another arrow in the campaign quiver to target the creative and media channels that generate the greatest revenue growth and long-term ROI.

Over the coming months we plan on continuing to improve upon the speed of analysis with a goal of being able to provide our clients with the real-time insights that will allow them to drive their business successfully.

I had been briefed that my purpose was to help educate marketers on our experience with modeling and scoring inbound calls with our voice-interactive Voce platform. More specifically, to help address the commonly held belief that modeling, scoring and segmenting calls is overwhelming and complex – resulting in many Marketers choosing not to apply it to their marketing efforts. Speaking from experience, I can definitely relate.

Over the years I have found that many “experts” in modeling are mathematicians and economists, like myself. More often than not, these experts like to make scoring and segmentation sound really difficult because they want you believe that you have to be really smart to apply it. They are really good at making the simple, complex. But it doesn’t have to be.

I’m on the side of the Marketer, here. Complexity should not be attributed any more value or worth than it deserves. What is most important to me is the result I get, not how overly-complex the solution can be. And that is true for modeling, too.

What is Modeling and Scoring?
My simple definition of modeling and scoring is the methodology and ability to segment callers. As a Marketer, I absolutely understand and appreciate the importance of segmentation. Being able to identify, categorize and present different groups of consumers with products and offers that are most attractive to them can be the difference between a winning campaign and a campaign that totally bombs. That I can get a result from.

Applying scoring and segmentation can be as simple as breaking out radio versus TV callers, or cell phone versus landline callers, and treating them differently. It can also be more scientific, like true regression scoring with overlay data in real time (insert shameless plug for TargusInfo, here), or caller experience scoring based on frequency of defined incidence. But as a Marketer you don’t have to be the expert on this. That doesn’t matter. What does matter is what you do with that knowledge.

When do you Score and Segment Callers?
When it comes to inbound calls we have developed a marketing approach around what we call the Conversion Landscape. The application of call scoring and segmentation can occur at many points of contact along the conversion landscape (and for the most part, this landscape can apply to online conversion efforts, as well):

1. Call delivery. Scoring and segmentation can be used to determine how to answer the call, who should answer the call, the order in which to answer the calls, and even go to the extreme of determining which calls to answer.
2. In-call experience. Scoring and segmentation can determine what to offer, when to offer it, and when to change the experience for the caller (for example, transfer to a live agent).
3. After-Call. Scoring and segmenting calls can also benefit your back-end marketing and lead conversion efforts by helping to determine what experience to provide, who to contact, how to contact them, and what to offer them.

What Should You Consider When Scoring and Segmenting Calls?

1. Variables with coverage. The type of call is a variable with coverage. Every call is either a landline or cell phone type.
2. Dynamic and predictable segmentation. You should be able to validate that the results of your segmentation are both measurable and impactful.
3. Actionable Plans. You have to have a formalized, operational plan on how you will treat each segment or the exercise is a waste of time and effort.
4. Simple Execution. I’ve seen too many good intentions fail because the treatment of segments was far too complex.

The most important outcome is producing outputs with clear and valid segmentation opportunities. With that objective in mind, it’s OK if there is front-end complexity within the scoring model, itself. However, when complexity creeps into the segmentation strategy and the prescribed actions of the marketing plan, it will quickly eliminate all of the intended gains derived from an effective scoring model. That is exactly what you must guard against.

This is where I have total appreciation for TARGUSinfo’s philosophy of “crawl, walk, then run” when it comes to applying scoring and market segmentation to your conversion strategy.

Sandra Davis, CEO of MDA Leadership Consulting, and author of the blog series Pearls of Wisdom, recently wrote an insightful post entitled “Culture Trumps Strategy.” In it, she argues that culture will either work to support or kill your strategic initiatives. Furthermore, she explains that culture ultimately comes through in actions and not words. So when you’re in the midst of leading a change initiative, and your people are not doing what they said they would do, the root causes can be elusive. So, as Peter Drucker once said, it is important to remind ourselves that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

This has never been more evident to me prior to joining Marketing Architects. We pride ourselves on having built a very strong culture with clear corporate values. In doing so, we have applied some rules of engagement in three critical areas of our business to ensure we never lose site of the importance of culture:

Acquisitions and Partnerships
Sandra Davis notes a Forrester survey that revealed more than 70% of change initiatives fail because of poor business change management. Culture wins. This same line of thinking should also be applied to all of your business partnerships. Culture clashes most often occur when corporate values do not align.

It is crucial that you clearly define and openly communicate your corporate values. In addition, identifying who you are NOT as a company is as critical as defining who you are. Being authentic with your culture, and not trying to be something you’re not, will ensure that you are screening new business opportunities with the care required to ensure a synergistic business fit and long-term, profitable partnerships.

Strategy Execution
Strong cultures make it easier for you to lead your team or organization to innovative breakthroughs. A strong awareness of shared values and norms provides thought leaders with a foundation for introducing new visions for change, and critical decision making that will help kill ideas that may conflict with the core of your business.

Most importantly, a strong culture will enable the organization to learn from failure. Failure will finally be viewed and valued as a learning experience and critical to finding future success.

Talent
Perhaps the most obvious area business leaders should focus on finding a culture fit is in the process of evaluating new and existing talent. My advice is to hire slow and fire fast. Hire people with diverse perspectives & experiences, but never waver when it comes to questions about culture fit. Take precaution to ensure new hires share consistent values.

Conversely, when you have a cultural outcast, be swift with your decisions. Outcasts are like an iceberg – you only see the tip of the problem, but the span of negative impact on the business is 20x greater under the surface. What you cannot see, you will surely discover after they leave. Poor culture fit will completely negate any knowledge or experience of an employee. My simple rule of thumb, here… Keep the jerks out.

Finally, if ever you are questioning what the most important elements of your culture are, Sandra Davis offers us a great exercise. Simply finish the following sentence: “It’s interesting – people here always seem to….” in the context of decision making, communication, and the behaviors that are most recognized and rewarded. What you find may surprise you. At the very least you will know that your culture cannot be a fit for everyone… and that will benefit your company in the long run.