Can CRM Applications Revive the Old Fashioned Letter?

As marketing directors across the country look for line items to slash from their budgets, is anyone seriously considering spending money on postage stamps in 2009?

Actually, yes.

Thanks to CRM applications, sales and marketing professionals can target prospects by mail more effectively, while enjoying the benefits of both short-term and long-term tracking for mail pieces.

For companies that have loaded their existing CRM systems with deep customer information, snail mail campaigns offer an opportunity to connect physically with customers who have tuned out e-mail newsletters or mass media advertising.

Traditional mail marketers often get excited when response rates top half a percent. Some of the most successful mail campaigns of all time enjoyed response rates of over three percent. However, to justify the cost of printing and postage, marketers often push themselves to achieve even higher percentage goals.

Jay Rollins explains some of the technical requirements for successful mail marketing campaigns in his column for TechRepublic. Specifically:

• use CRM applications to generate unique offer codes for each customer and each offer.
• run any new captured data through a de-dupe filter -- existing customers may have moved, or may be trying to game the system.
• utilize CRM systems to measure differences in response rates, tracked along with a "control group" responding to a previously-successful offer

Every successful campaign should generate enough information about your customers to help you refine a future campaign. With incremental improvements each time, your marketing outreach efforts should continue to become more effective.