It’s safe to say that almost everyone is being faced with budget or staff cuts – forcing us to ‘do more with less.’  It is crucial to take a good look at the money being spent on marketing initiatives for the year and the types of results they are generating.  Did you know that only 15% of the marketing initiatives you take garner short-term results? This means that 85% of today’s marketing efforts will be responsible for long term results. As they say, “Rome was not built in a day” and the same can be said for sustainable growth for any business.  What actions are you taking that will achieve long-term success?

Here are 3 steps you can take right now:

1) Engage customers - The average person is exposed to 5,000 messages a day but only remembers four. If you are not taking proactive steps to engage your customers then chances are your message is one that is easily forgotten. One of the ways you can engage customers is by reaching them through several channels including direct mail, email, and social media. Seeing a message in more than two channels increases the response rate by 10-15%. Another way to engage customers is through conversation. Find out more about them simply by asking (you can use PURL’s to do this) and apply that to future communication so you can reach customers on a more personal level.

2) Build relationships – As mentioned above, use information you can find out from customers and apply it to future communication so the messaging is relevant. Relevance is the largest lever on response in individualized direct marketing and is therefore key in building genuine relationships. Also, keep in mind that relevant messaging can receive a response rate 3 times higher than messages that are just personalized with a name. This is not just a once and done thing though. It’s important to maintain communication with appropriate timing and frequency to keep building that relationship.

3) Track results and utilize data – Tracking results is almost always done with marketing but actually applying the data from the results to future marketing initiatives is something that often falls through the cracks. Utilize data and make necessary adjustments to your plan to make sure you are achieving optimal ROI. 67% of marketing expenditures could achieve significant improvement in results without significant changes and without an increase in investment. These changes could apply to the messaging, marketing mix, and/or integration of different channels and are important to your company’s adaption to any changes in the marketplace.

All in all, you want to ensure that the right person gets the right message at the right time and in the right way while applying the aforementioned strategies. If you keep doing this you can ensure success for your company both in the short-run and long-run.