Archive for the ‘Conversion’ Category

Wasted Sales vs Fulfilment

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

It is imperative that you communicate with email responders within the first 24 hours, whilst your product is fresh in the enquirers mind.  This will maximise your chances of a sale.  Sounds obvious but if you operate a one man band and send out 5,000 emails its likely your going to get a few enquirers and a few sales.  Often we concentrate on the sales first and then when we have time we move to the enquiries…  Of course the sales are in the bad so you should go for the enquiries to convert more but even better than that you should have emailed fewer people in the first place so that you can manage both types of response without upsetting anyone.  This would also give you more time to focus on closing the enquirers!

Thanks to the power of the internet, the method of communication can be instant through on-line enquiries.  Product information instantly displayed when they click through from the initial email.  However, often, this is not enough.  You may need to send the enquirer brochures, samples or a free offer in order to generate a sale.  In many cases, you may not have the infrastructure or support to manage this in-house.  Perhaps you just want the entire process managed and are only interested in order taking.  Under these circumstances, we strongly suggest you use response fulfilment services to shorten the gap between the enquiry and order cycle.  Need help, post it here or ask us.

Direct Mail vs eMail

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

To give you an idea as to what type of medium to use in your marketing we have below compared typical statistics for Direct Mail vs Email Broadcasting.  Hope it helps!

  Email Direct Mail
Target Size 25,000 25,000
Typical Response Rate 1.4% 0.6%
Leads Generated 350 150
Reaction Time to Promotion Instant 2-6 days
Typical Goneaways 1.7% 6%
Mail / HTML Creative Design & Production £150 £300
Stationery Cost £0 £2,500
Print & Mail-Merge £0 £2,500
Enclosing & Fulfilment £0 £1,000
Postage £0 £7,500
Est. Price for responders / pre-paid response £5,500 £60
Prospect Data List £7,000 £3,000
Response Data Capture £150 £200
Totals £12,800 £18,560
Cost per Lead £36 £124