Direct Marketing Checklist
Use this checklist to ensure you have everything you need for your next campaign.Have more questions?
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Direct Marketing Basics
You have a defined direct mail marketing cadence.
A defined cadence aligned with market cycles will allow you to reduce costs, create a consistent routine that your prospects and staff can begin to expect, and ultimately lead to better ROI.
A defined cadence aligned with market cycles will allow you to reduce costs, create a consistent routine that your prospects and staff can begin to expect, and ultimately lead to better ROI. Your direct mail partner should have insights and recommendations suited to your business.
You know how many pieces were mailed, to whom they were mailed, and who converted.
Having this baseline data is critical to help you understand your campaigns.
Effective campaign management relies on knowing how many were mailed, which ones converted, and enabling effective follow-ups. Working with your data provider and creating a plan for campaign tracking is core to successful marketing.
You have a professional-looking mail piece, complete with disclosures.
An eye-catching and compelling mail piece is key to attracting your customers.
An eye-catching and compelling mail piece is key to attracting your customers. If you are struggling with design, your mail house partner may have the resources to help you navigate what works well and any compliance considerations you may need.
You are sourcing prospects from a credit bureau or another third party.
Sourcing prospects from a third party is a key piece of the direct mail process. However, if you are selecting from the same source as many other similar lenders, you run the risk of mailing to a highly saturated audience: diversifying away from your competitors may be a successful strategy to deploy.
Data vendors can be tricky. Leveraging a turnkey partner that can manage your campaigns for you may be the solution to help you enter direct mail without tons of vendor management.
You train and brief your store managers and staff about each campaign.
Front-line support is critical to your success. Great job!
Having your customer service representatives and others in customer-facing roles understand and be prepared for campaign responses and questions, and how to handle them, is super important to ensure a seamless, high-conversion experience.
Direct Marketing Tracking
You have a system in place to attribute an application and loan to your campaigns.
This is a critical first step towards effective campaign management, and a key building block for analytics and insights that help you continuously improve.
Implementing a system can be as simple as a reference code, or adding a lead source to your applications. The data you gather can be instrumental in understanding how well you are doing and where you can improve.
You have clear KPIs and targets for your campaigns.
Understanding how you evaluate success is important to ensure all stakeholders, including your vendors and partners, are working towards the same outcome.
Having data-driven expectations and targets give you a benchmark for performance, help you evaluate success, and prepare downstream resources to support conversion.
You have dashboards or similar “at-a-glance” systems to help you keep track of your campaign.
Reviewing these dashboards frequently to ensure they continue to track meaningful components of your campaigns. Working with an expert partner can help you further understand and optimize your insights.
Having a quick, easy-to-understand visual of campaign performance allows you to quickly understand how campaigns are going. Having these set up against the right metrics will allow you to closely track what matters and help justify further budget.
Your marketing system has the ability to integrate with your other systems of record.
This is a critical component of an effective and invaluable marketing effort. Maximizing the use of both marketing and loan data can be challenging, but incredibly powerful when done right.
Having a seamless experience to connect marketing with the rest of the organization is often critical to showcase marketing’s value and build a downstream feedback loop to continually improve.
You have a tailored customer experience for direct mail processing.
Having a more streamlined approach for direct mail responses is critical to keeping funding rates up. Having reporting on each stage is just as important, as it helps you optimize each stage and remove conversion bottlenecks.
Having a more streamlined approach for direct mail responses is critical to keeping funding rates up. Having reporting on each stage is just as important, as it helps you optimize each stage and remove conversion bottlenecks.
Selection and Optimization
You are able to run version (A/B) testing.
The more data points you have to test on, the better. Especially in a saturated marketing environment, having alternative data points can give you an edge.
Version testing is an important part of optimizing a campaign. As you begin to experiment with different prospect selection, creative designs, and delivery schedules, you begin to build out a data-driven optimization that takes campaigns to the next level.
You are leveraging data and technology (such as AI and ML) to target your ideal customer.
Make sure you are not just looking at your theorized ideal customer: often, advanced ML systems can help identify new personas that perform well that you may be overlooking.
Having a data-driven approach, especially backed by a powerful technology platform, helps dramatically improve prospect selection. While it may cost more, the increases in conversion and repayment performance vastly outweigh the costs.
You are learning and improving your prospect selection every campaign.
Constant improvement is key to campaign success: having a wider range of data points and leveraging an enterprise-grade ML platform can help make this even more effective.
We’ve seen clients go improve response rates by over 1 percentage point by leveraging our machine learning system. Without a system to improve your prospect selection, you are leaving significant possible returns on the table.
Your risk team is approving the vast majority of campaign responses.
If Yes
This is a very good sign that your risk and marketing criteria are well-aligned.
If No
You may be spending a significant amount of money marketing to the wrong audience. Connecting with a risk-informed partner can help you bridge the gap and help improve your bottom-line returns.
