Three Key Components to Direct Response Marketing with MaryEllen Tribby - I Love Marketing Episode #285

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish. And this is the I love marketing podcast. In this episode, you'll discover the three key components of direct response marketing. The most important part of your campaigns, the 60, 30, 10 rule, why you don't sell lingerie to lumberjacks, media buying and more with Genius Network alumni, Mary Ellen Tribbey. Mary Ellen is the CEO of Working Moms Only, founder of the CEOs Edge, best selling author and highly sought after speaker and consultant. Recorded live from the Genius Network annual event. If you would like access to the special resources and and show notes for this episode, please visit ilovemarketing.com 285 that's ilovemarketing.com 285.

I'm really super excited for our next presenter. I knew she was smart. I didn't really realize how smart she was until I actually met her, did an interview with her. This was several years ago now. We're good friends. Her name's Mary Ellen Tribbe and she's just really one of the brightest direct response marketers that totally gets it.

And.

And she's the proud founder and CEO of Working Moms Only, the world's leading newsletter and website for the empowerment of the working mom. Prior to founding Working Moms Only, she was publisher and CEO of Early to Rise, where she was responsible from growing the business to 8 million in sales to 26 million in just 15 months. Before that, she served as president of Weiss Research where she led the company to 67 million in sales from 11 million in just 12 months. Because of her impressive track record of generating revenues and profits, Mary Ellen is known in the information publishing world as the money honey. Okay, so Abby Moneyhun, she is the money honey. Okay. All right. Having run divisions at Forbes, Times, Mirror magazine and Crain's New York business, making her highly sought after business consulting, speaking and being an author. She's the founder of the Good News Kids, a foundation to house and protect homeless children and is the recipient of the 2009 Braveheart Women's Marketer of the Year award. Give it up for my dear friend Mary Ellen Tribbe, who's going to teach you some cool stuff. Thank you.

Thank you. Yes, Hello. Hello. All right. If you are not a direct response marketing expert or you do not have one in your company, you are not leaving tons of money on the table. Okay? Direct response marketing is the kind of marketing that is specific, quantifiable and immediate. Okay? So it's not branding. It is ROI based. It is dollar out, dollar in okay, There are many different channels of direct response marketing. There's direct mail, there's tv, there's space ad, there's radio, and of course, there's online. That includes things like space ads, text ads, and dedicated emails. In every single direct response marketing campaign, there are three key components. They are your copy, your offer and your list. The copy is the message that goes out to the prospect. The offer is what that prospect will get and how they receive it. And the list is essentially the pond in which you are fishing, right? Who you're trying to reach. Many, many people think that in direct response marketing the copy is the most important part of your campaign. That is not true. It is the list that is the most important part of your campaign. Okay? The list is responsible for 60% of that success. Your offer 30% and the copy 10%. The reason is you can have awesome copy. And if it goes to the wrong people, you will have zero response. You can have mediocre copy that goes to the exact right audience and you will have a good response. I like to say you don't sell lingerie to lumberjacks. Okay? Okay, so when we talk about, and we're going to talk about online for the purpose of this conversation, but please know it applies to all direct response. Okay? So when you're talking about traffic online, what is the most desirable kind of traffic? Well, it's endorsed traffic, right? So, yes, your affiliates and your joint ventures. But what is the problem with affiliates and joint ventures, right? A lot of big guys, they won't mail for untested offers, right? Everybody wants reciprocation, right? So what you end up doing is whoring out your list, right? With working moms only, I don't mail for reciprocation. I mail because a product or service is good for my community. Okay? So, and that's why you should be mailing. And of course, there's a lot of good old boys networks out there. Okay? So what is the solution to getting more traffic? You buy your way in. And that's what we're going to talk about today, essentially is media buying. Now, a lot of people media buy, yet they have never seen a data card. And this in front of you is a data card. And we're going to go through that and why it is so important. Okay? Now, a data card will be in any kind of media kit that you get, even if you're doing space ads or radio or tv, okay? Essentially what it does, it talks to you about the list, who is on that list. Okay? So here's an example of a data card. You have two examples. The first one is for an email list. The second one is for a direct mail list. Okay. And I'm going to show you the little bit of a difference in what you should be asking. So number one is the name of the list. Okay. Number two is the universe and the pricing of the list. For this example, you'll see that they've got about 388,000 Active Participants magazine subscribers. Okay. That $150 per m over there means $150, 1,000, not $150. A million, not $150 flat. So for every thousand names you rent, you will pay $150. Below that, you'll see their expire count. Expires will be slightly cheaper because they're not active subscribers at the moment. Okay. Number three is a description of that list. It will include demographics and psychographic information. Psychographic information is really important because it tells you about their behavior. So you always don't want to just be looking at demographics of a list. Number five is the advertising specifications. So will they split creative. Whenever you're testing a list, you want to make sure you are splitting and you are testing. So if you were sending an email campaign out there, you would rent about approximately 40,000 names from this list. To test, you would test 20,000, maybe with separate headlines. Okay. When you test, you test one variable at a time. But that's what number five does, is tells you what you can do there. As far as those advertising specs. Number six is the last time this list was updated. Number seven is the gender breakout. Okay? Very important. So this list you'll see is 88% female. Okay. Number nine is the source. Where did this information come from? A lot of these on here say things like direct response or say direct mail, inserts, cards. So you want a list that is direct response oriented, okay? Because that's what you're doing. You're selling to them direct. You want names who came from people directly. Okay? Number 10 is unit of sale. So why is that important? Because if you've got a $300 product and the average unit of sale on this list is 20, 28 bucks, 29 bucks. Probably not good buyers for you. Okay. Number 11 is selection. Okay? So this list you can break out. You can pull selects from there. You can do things like specific states. Before, Fabianne was saying that she knows where her buyers are. Therefore, if she's renting a list, what would she do? She could select those states. Okay? The Thing about a selection is you'll see on the side that every select you do will add an additional $16, $12, $10 to that $151 thousand. So every time you do a select, you're not at $150 1000 anymore. Now you're at 160 or 70 or 80 or. Or as many selects as you want. When I was running Weiss research, I did a lot of selects on lists, which is how I broke into a lot of lists that you wouldn't have thought about. Okay, number 12 is essentially the net name policy. What does that mean? That you're gonna essentially pay for 85% of the list. You're gonna pay for 100%. It's right there. Okay. The next card is the same exact thing, but it's direct mail. But this has one important thing that we used in the direct mail days that people don't ask their list broker now, which is the usage. When you do media buying, you are a detective. So if you see on a list, you have three good lists in front of you that you like and all of them have one common list in common that they've used, well, guess what? Now you're gonna go after that data card. Okay, I know I'm going fast. And the idea of this presentation is to introduce you to the right way to Media Buy. A lot of people, like I said, media Buy, and they've never ever seen a data card before. And doing something and doing something right are entirely two different things. So anytime you're about to go out and spend money, you need to look at a data card in order to do so. Okay, here are some resources for you. If you've never done this. Nextmark.com you can go to that website and you can print out your data cards yourself. Okay. Essentially you put in keywords and it's a really easy site. You can print out the data cards and you can start looking. The Oxbridge Directory is a wonderful directory. It costs about $2,000. What I do every year is I go on ebay and buy the previous year for about 39 bucks. SRDS is probably the best resources. And then changing the channel, which is 12 easy ways to make millions for your business, is a book I wrote with Michael Masterson a few years ago. And it really is detailed about direct response marketing and multi channel marketing. So. Wow. Okay. So here is kind of one of my case studies. When I was at Agora at the time, I had the most successful promotion in agora history in 35 years. It was one sales letter that did $17 million. 30% of that was from joint ventures and affiliates. 70% was from media buying. Okay. If I had not done any media buying and relied only on affiliates, I would have left nearly $12 on the table. Okay. Anyone who has any questions. Okay. One last thing of what you can do right now is survey your list. I'm a big believer in surveying your list for very different reasons. Okay. Because you need to understand birds of a feather flock together. So you're creating a community of like minded folks. So survey your folks. Ask them what websites they get their news from, what magazines they read, what papers they read. This will help you select your media. Always separate your buyers from your non buyers when you do surveys so that you can see the difference from the people who actually buy. Okay. At the end of every survey I do, I like to offer them a gift. When I was in the financial newsletter world, I would say would you like a report on gold ETFs or options? It's great for product development ideas and you give them what they want and thank them. You can use the surveys for press releases and then follow up with your community on the results from that survey and they really appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to this episode of ilovemarketing.com if you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event, go to geniusnetworkevents.com that's geniusnetworkevents dot com if you'd like access to the special resources and show notes for this episode, please visit ilovemarketing.com 285 that's ilovemarketing.com 285 5.