Red Rooster Group shares how their targeted direct mail campaign to Jewish Community Centers is achieving impressive results.

As the Principal of Red Rooster Group, I am committed to growing our business and instituted a marketing campaign that kicked off at the end of last year. While we are still in the early stages of the campaign, it is pulling a good response so far, and so I wanted to share it with you in the hopes of inspiring your marketing efforts this year.

The Plan

The plan included developing a list of 250 Jewish Communities Centers with multiple names for each organization, creating an 8-page brochure around the specific needs of JCCs, and hiring someone to make follow-up calls. Here’s exactly how the campaign has unfolded so far, including the steps we took, what it cost, and the results.

To begin with, I knew that to achieve real results, more than a one-time, quick effort would be required, and that relying on my time and abilities to make follow-up calls would be a mistake. So instead of trying to do everything myself, I planned out a specific campaign and enlisted others to help execute it.

Determining the Market

Like most design firms, Red Rooster Group has a particular area of specialty (branding for nonprofit organizations), but also works with a variety of clients. We understood that to be successful in marketing, you need to focus your promotion as much as possible, and so instead of creating a general capabilities brochure, we decided to focus on one particular market. In fact, this was a very focused market. Instead of nonprofit organizations, or even Jewish nonprofits, we decided to focus on Jewish Communities Centers based on our previous experience in helping three JCCs with their marketing. There are about 250 JCCs in North America, making it large enough to do a reasonable campaign and expect a decent result, and small enough to be focused and manageable.

List Development

The first step was building a list of the 250 Jewish Community Centers in North America. After we compiled a list of the organizations themselves, we hired someone off Craigslist to research the names of people for certain job titles such as executive director associate director, development officers, and board presidents. We assigned this at a flat rate of $200.

We now had a custom, qualified list of people in our target audience. You’ll notice that we got multiple names for each organization, aiming for at least two – one from the professional staff side and one from the board side, figuring that decisions can come from either direction and that it is better to have multiple people in the organization who have heard of you.

List Management

The list was originally created in Excel, which made it very easy to monitor as the names were added. It also made it easy to sort the list by state, which is how we decided to group the mailings. Ultimately, we found that this was not meeting our needs in terms of tracking the calls, and so after a lot of research into online CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems (we’ll be posting an article about this), we decided on salesforce.com and are in the process of uploading the lists into that online platform. This will allow us to input the interactions of each call made from our office or from remote locations.

The Brochure

While we were working on the lists, we were developing the brochure. Instead of showing our work with minimal copy, like most design firms, we created a marketing piece that demonstrated our understanding of the particular marketing challenges facing JCCs, including increasing their membership, improving their fundraising efforts, and helping them streamline their internal communications processes. This 8-page, saddle-stitched brochure features work that we had done for three other JCCs in addressing those particular needs.

The brochure had an introduction about their needs and a list of services. In addition, we invite the recipient to engage with us by including an interactive quiz that they can use to rate their marketing efforts in 10 different areas. This is intended to dramatically show their marketing needs (in effect helping them qualify themselves) and convey how we can help them.

The process for producing the brochure included determining the overall approach and content, compiling the case studies, writing copy, creating the marketing checklist, and doing all the pre-press to get it ready for printing. Given that we were drawing on our own experiences and case studies for the actual content, we were able to do this fairly expediently. The cost of our time spent on this piece was about $2,500. Printing 1,000 copies of the 8-page brochure cost $1,100.

The Mailing Package

The mailing package consisted of the brochure and a cover letter in a bright red 9 x 12 envelope to capture people’s attention. We created the cover letters in InDesign, and merged the names from the Excel file (exporting it as a CSV file). We printed them on our letterhead on our in-house printer in groups as we mailed them so they would have the current date. On a few occasions where we knew the particular recipient, we customized the letter; otherwise, we sent the generic letter.

We used the Avery mailing labels that come six per sheet and ran them through our printer to add our logo and address. We hand-addressed the labels to the recipients to give it a personal touch and to help it stand out from other mail.

Hiring Someone to Make Calls

The next stage was the mailing and follow-up calls. Instead of mailing out all 250 pieces at once, our strategy was to mail out a limited number of packets so that we could make follow-up calls. It’s ideal if the call comes from the principal of the company who is best able to speak about the services. However, I knew from past experience that these attempts would be short-lived, and not wanting to repeat that mistake, I hired someone to make the follow-up calls.

This person did not necessarily know about our design (in fact, knew little about it), but was a sales person in a different sector and was good at establishing rapport with people. The purpose of the calls was not to sell design, but to establish a connection, assess their needs, qualify them, and line up an appointment. The calls were also intended to gauge feedback on the direct-mail piece, determine their marketing challenges, and to get a sense of the overall needs faced by that market so that we are learning as well.

Training

I spent half the day with him, explaining our business and how we help clients, and another half day explaining the particular needs of the market we were targeting, as well as the particular approaches to take, potential objections he might hear, and how to handle those objections.

Instead of setting him free and expecting magical results, I provided direction, oversight, and feedback to monitor his progress, and provided support so that we learn what about what makes successful calls. I listened in as he called and found that he was doing an effective job in breaking through and catching people’s attention –  and that’s the key on the phone – getting through to people establishing rapport so that they will hear what you have to say.

Mailing & Calling

We mailed approximately 20 to 30 packets per week (we grouped them by state) and contained the calling sessions to a few hours each morning, so as not to burn out and to spread out the calls. On any given day, he could make approximately a dozen calls (this included reviewing the organization’s websites to get a sense of what they did before making each call) and was able to reach one or two  people each time. For the others, we left voicemail messages, so that they would know that we were following up on the brochure. It reinforced the fact that we wanted to work with them and prepared them for the fact we would be calling them again. We then waited several days before calling these people in order to give them a chance to call us back.

Results

We started in late November and then held off two weeks before the holidays. We have mailed out 3 sets of 20 packages so far (out of a total of 500) and are in the process of making the follow-up calls. Given that it takes several calls to actually get through to people, and that we haven’t actually spoken with that many people yet, so far we have had several positive responses, including:

• An executive director who called us in response to the mailing.
• A board member who said that she had received the piece and was impressed and would present it at their board meeting.
• An executive director who passed it on to their marketing director, who e-mailed me to set up a call to discuss their needs.
• An executive director came in for an appointment, which led to a proposal for a quarterly newsletter (which we are waiting to hear back about).

Given the limited amount of packages that have gone out, I am buoyed by these results and confident that this type of targeted mailing, coupled with the follow-up calls, will result in many new clients. I would expect that we can reasonably get 10 projects from this campaign, and I’ll estimate $10,000 each, yielding $100,000 worth of work, not including future work that may result from these clients. Our total investment in actual outlay was less than $6,000. Not a bad return on investment.

Budget

Here’s our budget for out-of-pocket costs (which doesn’t include our time in coordinating the effort, and in training and monitoring the telemarketer, which I consider part of my daily sponsor responsibilities).

Designing copywriting of the brochure (our in-house time): $2,500
Printing: $1,100
Envelopes: $300 (confirm)
Mailing Labels: $40
Postage: $200
Calling: $1,500
——————-
Total: $5,640

WAKE UP CALL: The Takeaways

1. Be Targeted. A brochure that addresses the specific needs of an audience is much more likely to resonate with that group and draw better response than one that says you can do everything. Being focused takes discipline since you don’t want to exclude other potential clients, but I believe that by limiting the scope and focusing on the needs of one particular audience, you’re more likely to achieve success. You can then build on that success to run other targeted campaigns. After all, each audience wants to see you as a specialist in their particular needs.

2. Planning: This initiative didn’t happen overnight – it took nine months to pull off, including conceptualizing what we would do, producing the brochure, compiling the mailing lists, setting up the database, and hiring the person to make the calls – but it was worth the effort. Now that the campaign is underway, it feels great that we have a systematic plan in place. And we can reproduce this type of campaign for another market.

3. Having a System: In order to make this campaign a success, we knew that we needed to have the proper infrastructure. This included a good CRM system for tracking which groups we mailed to each week, whom we called, and what was said. When we realized that Excel was insufficient for this task, I committed to investing in the proper infrastructure not only for this campaign, but one that would also allow us to grow as an agency.

4. Persistence: I decided that this is a market that we were going after and wanted to capture a certain market share, so I saw this campaign as part of a long-term effort. I was committed to not getting discouraged, even if this particular mailing didn’t achieve the results that I wanted. As with many things, success lies in the follow-up and persistence. I knew I couldn’t rely on myself alone to make the calls on a regular basis (which is where I think a lot of designers have trouble), and so I planned persistence into the process by hiring someone to make the follow-up calls. After a lot of planning and work, we now have a regular outreach campaign that is running largely without me.