Having chosen your marketing approach and its components it is time now to move onto doing it right through cost-effective practices or activities. To help you to do that here is a compendium of insights offered by various professionals from diverse industries:

Balu Pandian, Marketing Communications Manager – APC

1. Try and get more out of each of your marketing penny

Every APC advertisement has many options in terms of contact information. The sales address, telephone numbers, email ID, fax numbers and website URL, provide customers with communications options to revert to us. We address customer responses and refer all leads to our channel partners. We also get back to these customers after some days to make sure they are happy with our products. We also provide service information, contact details and service email. This helps existing customers if they need service. In this way we own our customers.

One more thing we have started doing is putting India sales and service contact information on the reverse of our visiting cards. It is simple yet effective.

2. Build on existing customerbase

We actively focus on incentivising existing APC customers. They get an attractive gift
when they refer 3 potential customers. This is a great way to generate leads with marginal costs. It is profitable to spend money on existing customers to keep them happy. Cost effective customer acquisition and retention strategies can play a key role in keeping overall marketing costs low.

3. Leverage existing USPs better

Our Service Policy (of providing 2 years warranty on the home UPS and battery) has always been an effective weapon in our marketing program. This means that APC couriers a replacement UPS to a customer in any part of the country and bears the cost besides having the courier collect the defective unit during the warranty period. Not many manufacturers can provide this level of service. This is an example of service marketing.

All this results in delighted customers besides creating the ultimate communications program - brand advocacy by tens of thousands of satisfied customers. No amount of competitive activity can succeed against that. Having understood this we effectively communicate this in all our collaterals.

Shivaji Sen Gupta, Chief Operating Officer, Nippon Acoustic Devices

1. Try direct mailing online

Online direct mailers are effective tools as most online media companies like RightServe, Icontract, MediaTurf and others offer e-mail campaigns that are directed against specific profiles. For example it is possible to device your campaign in such a way that your email direct mailer reaches a “senior management executive” working in a “software house” between the age of “30 to 40 “ working in “Paris”! And all this can be achieved for a value as low as between INR 0.50 to 1.00 per e-mailer.

A word of caution, although this sounds great the actual “click through” i.e. number of people showing interest and going to the url that you specify is as low as 2 to 3 %. But even this figure is good as it is otherwise a Herculean task to do a offline mailer campaign. This campaign is ideal in either an FMCG environment for local marketing or in offshore prospecting as far as services industries go.

2. Offline direct mailing

Though this form of direct mailing is very common, I have my reservations mainly on the RoI front. It has been my experience that though it is a low cost activity, its return on investment (RoI) is very low. Also one needs to bear in mind that in today’s information hungry world there is only a limited amount of information that one can mail. That coupled with postage / courier charges vis-a-vis RoI makes this an unattractive option.

Let me make a qualification here. If the objective of this exercise is to just create awareness then maybe this would come out effective as direct mailer have this “ long term awareness effect “ which essentially translates into some recall capability by the target group but never any serious sale revenue.

Also in my experience, offline direct mailer done using purchased or borrowed database is as follows:

a) 25 % of the mailers never reach the intended recipient.

b) 10 % return as undeliverable mail.

c) 25 % are discarded without opening the cover

d) 35 % of the mailers are glanced through but are then subsequently discarded because of wrong targeting and / or lack of immediate interest.

e) 5 % actually turn out to be the right target who are interested but most of them keep the mailer aside for a day when one needs it and as we all know what happens to filed documents – out of sight translates into out of mind!

Also as one can see that only 40% of the mailers are in the true sense received by the targeted audience. It is because of this that the offline direct mailer does not make sense unless the message one is trying to get across is generic. The one factor that could make this more effective is better targeting which some of the database vendors are attempting to provide today by use of technology.

3. Online banner advertising

Online advertising has finally arrived with companies like Rightserve and DoubleClick offering focused targeted banner impressions. This basically means that if you want to target only “youngsters” “between the age of 15 to 25” from the four metros of India the above companies assure you an accuracy which is above 95% which is amazing. And with cost per million (CPM) impressions being at around INR.350.00 it is a very attractive proposition. However the click through on banner adverts are as low as 0.7 % to 1 %. However the RoI ratio is decent enough for one to try this medium. This medium is especially effective when one’s business model is either web based and / or one has invested in an attractive web presence, which is rich in media and content.

4. Hoardings / Billboards

Both of these are a quick and cost effective way to get across to the masses and due to my positive experience with this medium, I am an ardent supporter of outdoor advertising. The only drawback being that these campaigns need to be localized as one needs to go for multiple hoardings in one city to make ones presence felt. One example being my earlier assignment where we had taken up 25 hoardings in Bangalore for a cost of One lakh Rupees per month. This gave the company image a huge boost and one can run various schemes to attract customers.

However this sort of thing can only be effective in India as the cost is affordable. Plus hoardings overseas are used for brand building and not selling!

Jairam, CEO, AmSoft India

1. Focus on repeat business as against new business

The most cost-effective marketing practice would be to devise strategies, which can get more repeat business, as it is simply unaffordable and not viable to keep splurging the capital it would take to generate new clients constantly. The repeat business costs about a tenth as much in sales and marketing as the new client. Repeat business is built on the correct strategic mix of excellence in delivery, clear communication of promise and scope, customer relationship management and follow through.

2. Focus on packaging your service offering

Package one’s service offerings into pre-determined products having component wise choice offerings – where a customer can choose from a combination of services or can go in for a already packaged service offering. The advantage here is being able to market a fixed offering for client needs, which can be easily positioned to the target market and also be cost effective. However, I must clarify here that this kind of packaging of services will solely depend on industry, region and the specific needs of the target market.

Some more practices and tips

Lakshmikanth, CEO, Prizedjobs

e - mail newsletters

We recently started this exercise of sending frequent newsletters covering global HR trends, current market situation etc. to a specific audience of our existing and potential customers as well as key influencers. It really helps because we could deploy this at a very low cost to reach our clients across the globe plus it positions us in our space as a knowledgeable player.

Ravi shankar, President, Grips India

Fine-tune the marketing process itself

Instead of targeting customers per se, it would be advisable to estimate available resources, sustainable acquisition costs and then build a profile of customers who could be targeted and would be profitable. These could then be targeted using a mix of direct marketing and personal contact, making it very effective overall.

Other tips/practices

1. Employees as marketers

One another cost-effective marketing practice would be to ensure all your employees are “marketers” and are customer focused.

2. Targeted publicity

Have articles and “news” items periodically published in your target press mediums.

3. Use the website

Spend a bit on an attractive and informative web page, which helps add value to you customer.

(The businessgyan editorial team collated the article with additional inputs from Sowmya, Marketing Communications Manager, Tektronix. Feedback can be mailed to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Issue BG5 Aug01

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