Give Proper Care and Placement to B-to-B Inserts

3. Your packing slip should be placed on top of your marketing materials.

4. If your packing slip is like many and has extra shipping labels for multi-box orders, try using them for order-dependent marketing messages. You can test slapping them on the outside of the box or leave them on the packing slip. Most packing slips are the domain of the warehouse or IT manager, not the marketers. That’s a pity.

5. In B-to-B, I suggest never putting in outside offers. The space and “presentation opportunity” is just too valuable to sell via some insert program, and clutter or confuse your own messages. B-to-C is a different game.

6. Try a small thank-you gift tied to the offers. One company I visited used a Tootsie Roll, another used a small, scented room deodorizer.

7. Code and track all your parcel insert orders to gauge your response. Given no postage costs, the results are usually astounding.

8. Assign a marketing person to track and report on parcel insert-driven sales and surveys. Your results here should top any other customer mailing activity.

Your ultimate goal is to get those inserts read and acted upon, as well as to train your customers to look for them because they contain useful information, free gifts or special deals.

Do you have superior parcel insert results? If so, I want to hear about them. E-mail me and let’s see how we can make inserts all they can be.

Terence Jukes is president of B2B Direct Marketing Intelligence Inc., a strategic consultancy based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that services clients in the U.S., Canada, France, the U.K. and Germany. You can reach him at www.b2bdmi.com or (954) 566-4451.