Carolyn Hansen

on April 21, 2010

category: direct marketing

Vice President/Marketing

5 ideas for customer targeting

Human beings love categorizing. It must be our survival instinct. You see something and you need to know: Friend or foe? Predator or prey? (My dogs get confused on these issues quite a bit. Thank goodness they don’t live in the wild.)

Human beings hate being categorized. When you put people in a box based on age, gender or skin color you’re going to annoy them – at the very least.

That’s the fun of database marketing. It’s a politically correct way to put people in boxes.

Some marketers still don’t realize how powerful this can be. We have an ideal in our heads about sending out one-to-one marketing messages – but that would be impossibly expensive and time-consuming. In reality, we pick out similar people in our database and send a message to the group.

What are good groupings for targeted messages?

1. New customers. People love you most when they first come across your wonderful product. Now’s the time to ask them to refer their friends to you.
2. Customers who’ve bought from you in the past 30-90 days. For most consumer products (except annual subscriptions or very expensive purchases), the longer it has been since purchase, the less likely that customer will ever buy from you again.
3. Customers who spend a lot with you. They deserve special treatment. Make sure you know who’s in this group.
4. Customers who bought product A and, because of that, are likely to buy product B. Retailers are often brilliant at cross-selling. Look at Amazon – they have it down to a science.
5. Prospects going through a life change. Marriage, births, divorce, moving to a new city – these are spending triggers for many, many products.

These are the broadest of categories. Depending on the size of your database and complexity of your product offering, there can be thousands of ways to slice up the data and achieve significant results.

It’s really up to your imagination to see the interesting ways your customers fall into patterns.

 

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Tom Reid

on April 6, 2010

category: direct marketing

Chief Healthcare Marketing Strategist

Boomers and Medicare marketing – hype vs. reality

Medicare marketing specialists are clearing their throats, revving their engines and getting ready to get ready for the influx of Boomers  who will be turning 65 starting in 2011. We have heard all the speculation about Boomers’ attitudes, their hopes and dreams, their innermost insecurities and their dedication to their grandchildren.

What’s implied in all of these articles and blog posts is that, because the quantity of Medicare-eligible people is about to expand, a huge shift in strategy is called for.

I don’t deny that marketers may need to be aware of some generational differences. But the differences between someone born in 1944 vs. 1946 are not nearly as great as many marketing pundits want us to believe. There’s no secret sauce that will make a Boomer respond at a significantly higher rate than the people who have been aging in to Medicare for the past year or two.

Marketing strategy for Medicare should evolve, not wipe the slate clean. It would be suicidal to start from scratch because demographers have labeled your new audience “Boomers.”

This means, if print advertising has given you a satisfactory cost per lead last year, don’t drop it for a completely digital campaign this year.

On the other hand, if you’re not thinking about social media when 46% of online Boomers maintain a social network profile, you’re going to be left in the dust. Maybe not this year, maybe not next. But soon.

Medicare marketing has always been about engaging content and smart targeting within the over-65 audience. That has not and will not change. Boomers will not retire all at once. Some Boomers are much healthier than others. These are the more salient issues for marketers than their status as a large group born in the same cohort.

We need to treat this group more like the individuals they are, as far as possible, and less like a massive market waiting to be exploited.

 

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