My best ever day at work started off as a moment of sheer terror.
I opened the front door of our office building and the hallway was almost blocked with mail bags.
This usually meant one thing.
We ran direct mail campaigns, and every few years there would be a monumental cock up with the addresses and the Royal Mail would return the whole to to us as undeliverable.
All the costs from print and enclosing would be on us (have you ever thought about physically putting letters in the envelopes when you have a hundred thousand or more of them?). Then you’d have to re-run the whole thing on an impossible deadline.
Thats’s what this looked like.
Feeling a little bit sick I opened the bag and found….
…reply envelopes.
The smaller envelopes with the business address you gave customers in the days before forms moved to the internet.
I pulled a few open and they were all legit. They were people cashing in their points from a loyalty scheme we ran.
We’d run a campaign each quarter, and we’d usually get a bag or two on the first day, then a trickle of half bags over the rest of the week.
Today there were about a dozen, and it was indeed my fault.
(What follows is probably only of interest to direct marketing nerds like me, but there’s a life lesson in there if you can unpick it.)
We ran this campaign for a UK Telecoms company – Mercury Communcations. If you remember the Mercury Music Awards, that wasn’t Freddy Mercury, it was them.
The deal was you’d get “music notes” (get it?) for what you spent on your telephone bill and you could cash them in for CD’s and other music related gifts.
Loyalty schemes had been a bit of a thing in marketing until one day, Esso pulled their loyalty program and all the corporate sheep in marketing departments up and down the country decided that the age of loyalty must be over.
But we had data, so I had a poke around.
I found out that people who had actually cashed in their loyalty points for something, went on to spend more in the next year than the year before, to well above the cost of the gift.
So, I planned a test.
In half the mailing I added a line telling the customer what they could already earn, and how many points they needed for the next item.
And being me, I just sent it.
I’ve long believed that it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission, but this was probably the biggest gamble I’ve taken on this, given that it was someone else’s money I was playing with.
The results were way more than I ever expected, about 5x more, but my company was paid a piece rate for sending out the gifts, so we had a nice windfall, and when we go the next month’s phone bill data, the numbers worked. These people were on average spending more than the gifts had cost.
That’s not to say there wasn’t the usual corporate-style witch hunt for explanations in the meantime though. It took everyone a while to spot the little extra text I’d added to the mailing and even then, they didn’t believe that such a tiny bit of copy could make that much difference. It can. I’ve done it since.
Through the whole month until the data came back proving me right, if there was ever a fuss about it, I’d just remmeber seeing those bags, my stomach dropping, then my heart shooting back into my mouth as I realised the size of the win I’d created.
There’s something different about handling bags of mail, compared to just seeing lines rack up in a database, so I doubt I’ll ever get that feeling again, but you never forget your first time.
