Anyone who says 2% is an acceptable response to a direct mail campaign has never seen the movie, Minority Report.
In this Spielberg flick, Tom Cruise plays a Washington, D.C. detective in the year 2054. When we first meet him he is wearing a virtual reality glove, frantically sorting through a stream of disjointed video. He is clearly an expert at interpreting this data and moves very quickly to focus on what he perceives to be the critical information.
We come to find out that the data is coming from 3 human computers. These three people are called �pre-cogs� which is short for Pre-Cognitive. They have visions of the future, but they can�t talk. In fact, they are comatose, floating in a laboratory pool and covered with electrodes and wires. Their visions are transmitted through these wires into a computer system that displays video snippets for Cruise and his team to study.
As the scene develops we learn that all of the pre-cogs� visions involve murder scenes. The pre-cogs act like high-tech, supernatural chickens. They lie in their pool and when they get a vision they start convulsing and the video starts flowing and in the end, a little, egg-like ball comes rolling out of the machine. The ball has the murderer�s name on it. It�s Cruise�s job to interpret the data, figure out who is the killer, who he�s gonna kill, find out where they live and how and when the murder scene will develop and go catch the killer before he commits murder.
This is database marketing taken to an extreme. Cruise and his special unit have learned to interpret data that helps them find killers before they commit the crimes. In fact, the cops have become so good that they�ve eliminated murder completely! That�s right. There are no murders in the D.C. metro area because the killers are caught before they kill.
Suspend your disbelief for one minute and think about your marketing program. Imagine if you were able to predict � before you sent out direct mail � which prospects would buy from you and which would not. With this information you would be able to get 100% response to every mailing. There�d be no need to mail to people who you knew were not going to buy. Your waste would shrink to 0% and your profits would soar. And best of all it really can happen, but you gotta believe!
Many of the biggest scientific and business breakthroughs have been made by people who did what people said couldn�t be done. Columbus, Galileo, Einstein, Dell, Gates, Shultz (Starbucks). These men had visions and determination. They were not confined by conventional wisdom and they changed the world. Let�s follow their lead and set our sights higher.
You may be happy with a 2% response. In fact, 2% response may be very profitable for you. But how much more profitable could your advertising be? Shouldn�t we strive as marketers to achieve what Cruise has accomplished? We may never get to 100% response, but that should be our goal. We have the technology, now we need to develop the skills. If we keep digging through the data, testing new creative and refining our approach we will surprise ourselves with the levels we can reach.
