Marketing 101: Micro Campaigns Execution

Yesterday I discussed the strategy behind micro marketing campaigns. Today I’ll dig into the nuts and bolts of how I execute these events. Your tools and milage may vary but the concepts should be basically the same.

So much for yesterday’s Why, here’s the How.

Mining for contacts. For your first campaign, I recommend searching for past customers who have had no activity in the last twelve months. The goal is to reach out to people who still remember you and have positive memories of the business relationship. I use QuickBooks(affiliate link), and this process is fairly simple once you spend a little time learning how to run the correct report displaying the correct columns. Then, I export the results of that report as a CSV file that I can pull into a spreadsheet.

Cleaning up the data. This is the ugly part. You will need to delete rows, move around columns, change column headings, etc. When all that is done, you need to go through line by line and make sure you have a solid contact name, postal address, and email address for each company. Sometimes this means manually looking at your CRM and pulling the data over. I’ve completed this process several times now and it goes faster and faster each time.

Writing copy. For me, this is the fun part. Basicially, dream up an offer that seems to good to be true, and put it into words; make sure to include at least one color graphic. Keep in mind you will be mailing and emailing the campaign when you are designing it. I like to be able to reuse the content with very little layout change.

Ship It. I’m still experimenting with combinations of email blast, direct mail piece, and then email blast again. Experimentation is the key. You need to track the results and figure out which order and combination of the above works best for your client base. For those interested I use iContact(affiliate link) for email blasts and SendOutCards(network marketing affiliation) for direct mail pieces.

If you have questions about the details of how I execute these campaigns I’ll share what I can without giving away competitive advantage in the comments.

Photo Credit