A huge number of businesses don't even respond when people reply to direct marketing or advertising
According to an article in Harvard Business Review recently, some American companies, most of whom are putting more and more marketing budget into slick and captivating direct marketing campaigns, are wasting their money.
HBR tested responses from outbound email, from websites and from traditional direct marketing campaigns. Remember, they weren’t testing how or how many responses an individual campaign received, but instead looked at what happened to those responses.
Did anything happen? Was information promised actually sent? Did a salesperson call to check that the information had been received?
You’d think that firms would be slick at this kind of thing, but while some were, a massive 23% of all the HBR test responses went totally unanswered. Not just a slow reply, or a poor quality reply but no reply at all.
It all reminds me of a test that the Ford motor company did in the 1960′s. They found that in some instances, fewer people who had seen their advertising actually bought a Ford than those who had never seen some of their advertising. They might as well have spent an afternoon burning their money in the car park.
It all goes to prove that advertising and direct marketing is still struggling to become a science, and that more marketing people need to realise that marketing is an end-to-end process that doesn’t even stop with a purchase.