Addressing consumers in a direct and personalized way is becoming, technically, increasingly easy. Attracting the attention or even the interest of these consumers, however, is less easy. In a context of over-demand from consumers, direct marketing needs more than ever, beyond the technical aspects, to fundamentally optimize the quality of its messages in order to hope to generate a response. Insight is clearly the ally of choice for direct marketing.
Direct marketing represents almost as much advertising expenditure as TV, press, radio, cinema and billboards combined, or around a third of expenditure. The volume of information available to companies in consumer databases thanks to the rise of CRM and now what is called "Big data", offers an unprecedented targeting possibility. Targeting has the corollary of personalizing offers but also messages.
However, if we take the case of emailing, the saturation of inboxes leads to an opening rate of less than 20% in B2C with a click rate of only 3% on average. If we are also interested in the time spent on the message by those who click, we are surprised by averages which do not exceed a few seconds (on average significantly less than 10 seconds). For contact strategies (shipping day, newsletter format, selection of targeted offers), it is clear that almost all companies have effective campaign management tools. But in a context where each email marketing necessarily faces competition from other companies in the same sectors, but also from product categories in other sectors, the attention that a consumer can give to it on a daily basis is reduced to the strict minimum. A direct marketing manager must therefore face a context which is generally intrinsically difficult. When asked to carry out a campaign, three other factors are added to these difficulties:
He is informed relatively late of the campaign to be carried out,
He has little information on the target(s) to hit,
The arguments for valuing the offer that are transmitted to him are either concise or exhaustive, so bias is rare.
He then finds himself in the position of having to define a significant part of the product positioning (target and message) very late in the value chain. To skillfully combine targets and associated messages, he must seek out the consumer insights to which the offer he must promote best corresponds. In-depth work, as much as delicate midwifery. Because detecting the most relevant tensions in each of the targets it will address is precisely the best guarantee of generating real consumer attention and encouraging a first click. Because, beyond the form (the visuals, the editorial tactics), it is the relevance of these tensions, staged in the message which will touch the consumer at the heart of their motivations. Through this in-depth work on the insights corresponding to each of his targets, the direct marketing manager will “put the consumer” into his message, rather than only pushing an offer in the form of product characteristics. This consumer orientation, or even this “insight orientation” often constitutes a paradigm shift. But let's agree, why would a consumer take the time to read one message more than another, among the mass of those he opens? Because this message tells a story that is its own. This story begins with an insight that targets a tension that corresponds to it and ends with a product benefit that he would then wish to know by detailing the offer. It is by feeling understood that the consumer agrees to listen. To effectively put into practice what seems like common sense, time is too often short. Product managers really benefit from associating direct marketing earlier when it is still possible to assess the relevance of the positioning of the offers. A positioning that requires good mastery of consumer profiling of each insight in order to promote relevant product benefits to the right targets.