Tips to Optimize Your Direct Marketing Campaigns With a CRM

A man looks at bar graphs on his tablet.

You’d probably sell more policies if you had an infinite marketing budget.

But odds are you don’t have a money tree in your lobby.

In fact, the average business has a marketing budget of around 7% of their gross revenue, according to the Small Business Administration.

That’s why tracking your direct marketing campaigns is so important to your company’s finances: When you know who becomes a customer and how you hooked them, you’re positioning yourself for sustained revenue.

For example, it might be that people in Illinois respond well to direct mail for vehicle service contracts and websites make more sales in Colorado.

Report showing sales breakdown by year, state, mileage and media campaign

Advanced reporting in our direct marketing CRM can help you pinpoint the campaigns that won, lost or have real profit potential with the right tweaks.

Let’s cover some of the proven ways to put those analytics to use, broken down by media type:

Personalize Direct Mail

 If you notice one of your direct mail campaigns didn’t generate the pull you expected, what should you do?

Well, nowadays we expect marketing to be personalized, especially when it comes to what arrives in our mailbox.

It probably makes sense to look for ways to speak (or write) as directly to your customer as you can. That could include:

  • Showing a picture of their car, down to the exact model and color
  • Showing a picture of the outside of their house (yes, it’s possible!)
  • Listing the common types of problems that vehicle or home might have given its mileage or age
  • How much those repairs might cost—and how much they could save by buying one of your warranties

And since personalizing your marketing can increase ROI by 70%, it seems like it’s worth the little extra cost and effort.

E-Mail’s Secret Weapons

 Here’s a pretty amazing stat: You can expect $42 in return for every $1 you spend on email marketing!

But even with a 4,200% ROI, you can still improve your performance.

One way is to include some relevant preview text.

Email preview text example

Believe it or not, including effective preview text can increase your open rate by 45%!

How do we know that? A/B testing, which is picking one variable to change while keeping everything else the same.

There are other A/B tests you could do, like the length or your subject line or the color of your CTA button.

And since Inline has “Buy Now” emails, you could play with which color pulls the most. That one tweak alone can increase responses by 21%!

 

Affiliate Marketing

The only thing better than making a sale is having someone else do the selling for you.

Affiliate marketing report summary

Inline makes it easy for you to set your affiliates up in our system! This is a major competitive advantage other CRMs don’t offer.

With our reporting, you’ll be able to analyze your affiliate’s performance just like you would your own call center.

And what if some affiliates aren’t selling like they should? A couple of things you can do:

  • Follow up with them; they may have questions or roadblocks you can answer
  • Offer a bonus or incentive on top of what they would normally receive

But be careful: You’ll only want to offer a bigger bonus if you have a firm grip on your profit margins… which you’ll know by glancing in our CMS.

 

Socialize Smarter

It’s not always what you say, but how you say it.

And sometimes, an emoji can be worth a thousand shares.

Really!

Including something as simple as a 😊, ❤️, 🏠 or 🚗  can increase comments and shares by 33%!

Admit it: Your eyes probably widened a little seeing what’s in the line above.

So, if you’re not using emojis, give it a try.

And if you are, but the performance is lackluster, try scheduling your posts a little differently.

It could be your audience isn’t online when you post. Fortunately, there’s a study that shows the best days and times to get social.

 

Export Everything

 Now, you might be thinking “This all sounds good, but I don’t feel like exporting all that information from all my applications.”

Don’t worry. You can export everything with Inline’s direct marketing CRM! All the data you want, all the reporting you need, is right in our system.

Just schedule a test drive of our CRM’s capabilities to see how easy it is.

You might get an incredible ROI on your time.