Response management report 2011

Key Findings

Brands looking to drive sales by encouraging prospects to request product or service information online are only managing part of the journey. To ensure the maximum number of prospects convert into sales, there are some critical steps along the way that still need to be smoothed out:

• It takes 5.4 days on average to deliver a brochure following an online request. This is 1.8 days longer than in 2009

• 53% of companies failed to have an address finder on their website forms

• Only half of the companies only offer an online or downloadable version of their brochures

• Only one in twenty offer to email the brochure to the prospect

• One-third of companies send an email to acknowledge a brochure request

• While 45 per cent personalised the mail pack sent to enquirers, only three in ten used the prospect’s contact data for ongoing marketing via email

• Nearly one in ten companies did not respond to an online enquiry at all, despite offering the facility to request information via their web site

In this survey, 217 companies in 10 different sectors,who had been pre-qualified as to whether they produced a printed catalogue/brochure, were sent a request for a brochure and further information about their products/ services. The enquirer’s emails were carefully checked for any bounce back notifications to ensure that the enquiry had been received. A few requests were also made by a telephone request.

A similar survey was conducted with a sample of 200 companies in August 2010 and the year before that. A comparative table in the report gives us a quick overview of the trends in response management.

response_management_study_2011.pdf