Ian Hughes says there are lessons already learned which should be applied to modern day marketing.

One of the things that drives me crazy about DM is that still today, after all these years of change, people think the ‘M’ stands for Mail.

This relentless holding on to a past that has only a small, but significant part to play in the future, is holding an entire industry back.

But before I completely throw my toys out of the pram, I would like to show you how a quick walk down marketing’s memory line can be useful.

If you read Herschell Gordon Lewis’s column in this magazine (page 19) you will   find it filled with interesting  copy advice. You may be tempted to dismiss it on occasions, because it can seem anchored in a past that is all about copywriting for letters.

But it isn’t; it’s as relevant now as ever.

You see, when Herschell or other copy geniuses write about the copy that goes on an envelope, you simply need to replace the word ‘envelope’ with ‘Google adwords ad’.

It seems clear to me that not enough people come even remotely close to doing that. You only have to read the copy of the ads you see on Google to know that. Very few of them have been written, very few of them are tested.

In one of my business we  do adwords advertising to encourage people to join up as mystery shoppers. To do this I have tested a number of different treatments of the incentive to mystery shop. We have projects that pay from £5.00 to £50.00, with the most popular projects paying around £25.00.

There are three things I test. First, the amount of the incentive. I have tested £50.00, £40.00, £35.00, £30.00, £25.00 and £20.00 as an incentive. Guess which one wins? The £25.00 one.

It out-pulls £50.00 by a factor of nearly 50 per cent.

 hen I do a strange test. I test the amount with and without the pence. So, £25.00 and £25. In some cases, for some ads, the £25.00 works better and in other cases the £25 works better. I don’t try to overanalyse why that is, but I do keep testing to make sure the answer is right.

Finally, I test the positioning of the incentive within the creative. Should it be the first thing that you see or the last thing that you see ‘£25 to Mystery Shop’ or ‘Mystery Shop £25’. Again, the results vary depending on a number of other factors. It is not safe to say that one treatment works best, but you can target the different treatments, to get the best possible results.

Breaking the rules

So, when Herschell and other copywriters talk about the importance of words and order and testing I buy it – and I buy it big!

We have also tested different treatments of our landing page for the ads. At the moment, our control page breaks every single rule in the book. It starts with a warning that there is a scam around trying to get people to pay money to become a mystery shopper. It works 100 per cent better than not having the Scam Alert in there.

To my mind, the DM (Marketing) community should wake up to the fact that a lot of what we need to do is not some new-fangled tech-speak, but just the rigorous application of lessons already learned.

It really irritates me to listen to some agency guru on a platform talking about how clever they are when they are just applying new fangled jargon to the same stuff.

More worryingly, it irritates me that many of these people spend so much time in pursuit of the new, that they aren’t spending any time learning from, and reflecting on, the past. Because there is a wealth of lessons already learned that could really jump-start their campaign.

But all of that does not irritate me as much as direct mailers clinging to the past. I see it within DMAs that still have mailing councils and data councils and list councils . . . and throw a bone to the new media council. Meanwhile, Internet trade bodies are rife. The Internet is direct marketing!

There are DM trade shows that still talk about the physical movement of goods and there are now attempts to classify direct marketing as digital marketing. The problem is not in the word, it is in the fact that as soon as you shorten it to DM, people assume it’s Direct Mail! 

I love direct mail: it has an important place as part of the marketing mix. But it is as important to DM now as New Media was 15 years ago, which is, not very. We should change the title of Direct Mail and Inserts and other such tools to Old Media. At least then we can give it due reverence and learn from its important contribution to our future.

 Ian Hughes is managing director, Consumer Intelligence. Email: ianh@consumerintel.com   Twitter: ianchughes  Facebook: ianchughes   And on LinkedIn.