Janie Wilson, co-founder and vice president of Excalibur Direct Mail & Marketing, was recently honored with the Sustainer of the Year award by the Junior League of Winston-Salem. The recognition led to a feature in the spring/summer issue of WOWS, the local chapter’s publication.

The profile details Janie’s job as chief administrator in charge of human resources, legal, purchasing and risk management at Excalibur as well as her l0ng-standing role as principal liaison with the U.S. Postal Service.

Congrats, Janie!

Fulfillment services have been a staple at Excalibur ever since we opened our doors in 1972. Over the company’s four-decade history, Excalibur has provided fulfillment and kitting services to a variety of clients from Lexington Furniture to Hanes Hosiery for their L’eggs panty hose product line.

Today, we are nearing completion of a 27,000-unit project that began a little more than three weeks ago. The project’s goal is to reach school officials across the country regarding a nationwide fundraising campaign.

The project involved a significant amount of work by our Data Department on the front end, cleaning and organizing the client’s database so as to ensure that we had only the most updated and deliverable contact information and mailing addresses possible for the project.

From there, we began the production phase of the project, assembling a cardboard box similar to a pizza box to carry a premium, magnet and a variety of printed materials. Over the course of the project, our production team averaged 2,500 units assembled per day!

Once the box was constructed and the materials inside, the boxes were sealed, addressed and delivered to the post office on 65 skids. Each skid was organized by zip code, so all the boxes going to St. Louis were grouped together and on a separate skid from those going to Philadelphia.

Although the client was pretty far into their project planning process when they contacted us, our postal experts here at Excalibur determined that the client could save a significant amount of money on postage if they redesigned the box, which had yet to be created, and reduced the contents inside to bring the overall weight of the package to under one pound. Excalibur consulted with the client on several package redesigns that ultimately led to a box design that weighed less than one pound. Additionally, our production team worked with the local USPS officials to develop presentation alternatives that would ensure that the packages moved quickly through the postal system.

Due to our close collaboration with the client, Excalibur saved approximately $100,000 in postage costs alone, which gave the client confidence in their choice of Excalibur as a strategic executional partner and in moving forward with a national project of this size and cost.

Do you have a fulfillment or kitting project on the horizon and need some advice on the most cost-effective and efficient way to execute it? Our team is waiting to hear from you!

Ah, the $65,000 question.  Before gazing deep into our crystal ball for the answer, we often try to answer the question with another question – “What is a response worth to you?”

When you boil direct marketing down to the basics, that’s essentially the business we’re in – the response-generation business.

Direct marketing, which endeavors to communicate directly with a target audience to elicit a specific action or response, has been shown to have the best Return on Investment (ROI) when compared to other forms of marketing.  But it may not be right for you.

Direct marketing yields the best results when you are selling a product or service that includes one or more of the following:

• The product has a relatively high profit margin (35% or greater).
• The benefits of your product or service can be articulated in three to four bullet points.
• You can assign a Lifetime Value to your customers through repeat purchases.
• You provide an incentive and timeframe to prompt action.
• You track your responses by solicitation.

The immediate goal on any direct marketing project is to determine how many responses you need to breakeven on your total project cost.  For example, a standard 5,000 piece postcard mailing, including postage and prospect list, costs roughly $2,000, and typical response rates on a prospect mailing generally range between .5% and 3%.

Assuming your profit margin is 35% and your product sells for $125, you need to sell 46 units, generating $5,714 in revenue, to break even.  The breakeven unit number is slightly under a 1% response rate, which is reasonable.  You can see that higher margins and/or higher unit prices put less pressure on the response rate necessary to reach the break-even point.

Beyond breaking even, another factor to consider when mulling a direct marketing campaign is the lifetime value (LTV) of the new customers you acquire.  Is this a single-sale circumstance, or will these new customers potentially purchase additional products or services from you?  The economic dynamics of your business determine how you might quantify these benefits in relation to the overall project cost.

Over our four–plus decades in the direct marketing business, we’ve learned a few lessons over the years. Here are a few to consider:

• Don’t get your expectations too high on a prospect mailing.  Acquiring new customers can be expensive and tedious, so focus on enhancing the potential upside with each customer once you get them in the door.

• Measure everything you do and test variables.  One of the most frequent questions we receive is, “What works?”  If we knew the answer to that question, we would have already published a best-selling book on the topic.  Every situation and circumstance is different, so there’s no one easy solution.  We recommend testing a variety of elements – timing, offers, packages, copy, graphics – to see how it changes the response.

• Use data-driven marketing strategies, especially if the target is existing customers.  It’s too easy to send blanket e-mails or generic direct mail packages to everyone in your database.  Show your customer that you know them by sending offers or information that relate to their buying habits or patterns.

If direct marketing seems like a viable option for you, here are a few tips on how to get started:

• Articulate three to four benefits the recipient receives from using your product or service.

• Formulate an offer that gives the recipient an incentive to act by a certain date. 

• Decide whether a postcard or letter is best for your project and audience. 

• Though they are generally more expensive to produce, letters can sometimes generate better results, especially when marketing more complicated or technical products or services.

• Postcards generally produce lower response rates, but are easier and less costly to produce.  They are particularly effective when the goal of the project is to build traffic to a location or website.

• Leverage any in-house graphics. Many product manufacturers or franchise parent companies have stock artwork that can be used for little to no charge and provide a consistent look and feel with the company’s overall corporate brand.

• Inquire about possible co-op opportunities if you are a distributor for a product.  Many manufacturers will help offset the cost of a marketing project if it features their product.

• Obtain a good target list for your project. This is probably the most important aspect of direct marketing, and we will cover it more extensively in a future post.  If you’re using a company’s existing customer list, be sure to check that the contact info for each target is accurate.  If the project is a prospecting effort, check to see when the data was last updated and spend the time to double-check that the contact information is correct before launching your campaign.  Direct marketing projects are only successful when you can establish a direct connection with your target, so having a bad email address, phone number or mailing address makes it less likely for this to occur.

Should you have specific questions about your next direct mail campaign or want some help formulating a direct marketing strategy, we’re here to help! Feel free to contact us!

We hope this blog will be a forum for dynamic conversation about the direct-marketing industry, with insights provided by us about real-world client successes and challenges we encounter along the way. We’ll also periodically share news and information gathered from other industry-related blogs and sites. Occasionally, we’ll shine the spotlight on members of our team here at Excalibur and their work in the community.

So bookmark us, share us with your friends, but most of all, be sure to check back often!