The Tribune

MARKETING REVOLUTION

By D'ARCY RAHMING

I BELONG to a marketing association where the guru we follow, Dan Kennedy, has been insisting that everyone should be using direct mail to a greater degree. He's been writing about direct mail for years, but I, like the majority of his clients, have consistently ignored him. The good part of that is it allowed me to really master the Internet and social media, which can deliver faster results.

It took me a while to move to more traditional media such as newspaper advertising. However, my testing soon revealed that there is no superior edge by media type. This testing is why I use a multimedia approach. To use a more concrete example, sometimes newspapers are better than Facebook ads and sometimes they are not. So direct mail is probably going to be effective when I give it a try depending on a few variables.

The primary variable, I believe, that determines effectiveness in media selection is who is targeted. For example, a client of mine hired me to promote a product that only works on people who are 40 years or older. I advertised it on Facebook and received a ton of leads, but very few of them converted to sales.

I switched to newspaper advertising and, to my surprise, conversions went up massively. When interviewing some of the persons who came through the newspaper advertising, I heard the same thing over and over - they thought that because they saw the offering on the Internet it was a scam, but when they saw it in the newspaper it appeared to be real. Which leads me to the conclusion that people in the Bahamas aged over 40 trust newspapers more than the Internet.

So back to direct mail. Who, then, will direct mail work best for in the Bahamas? There are a lot of challenges faced in using regular mail - the physical delivery of letters in the Bahamas - as a viable media for marketing. It is not like the US where the postman delivers to your door. In fact, many families have a family member gather and sort through the mail before delivering it to the relevant parties. Regular mail could take weeks or even months.

My conclusion is that direct mail will work best for business to business communications, with delivery being done by your own personal postman, that is, through a messenger. However, this means that each piece of correspondence is expensive and must be crafted carefully lest it never make it past the person responsible for sorting the mail of the business. We call this person a gatekeeper, and in future articles we will talk about getting around this person to reach your intended target.

NB: D'Arcy Rahming holds a Masters of Management from the prestigious Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. A lecturer at the College of the Bahamas, Mr Rahming has clients in general insurance, retail, the health and medical fields, sports federations and financial services. To receive his marketing newsletter FREE go to http://DArcyRahming.com or contact him directly at darcyrahmingsr@gmail.com