The Power of Direct Mail Marketing

In this episode, Keith Goodman, a direct mail marketing expert, discusses the resurgence of direct mail marketing across various industries, especially in education. Keith highlights direct mail's targeted approach, allowing for personalized messaging to different audiences, a significant advantage over digital ads' broad reach. He explains how direct mail utilizes detailed demographic and psychographic data, such as household composition, interests, and behaviors, to create highly effective campaigns. The discussion covers how colleges leverage direct mail for marketing programs like summer classes to parents of high school students and unique certificate programs. Keith shares insights on utilizing data like drive time, proximity, and specific interests to enhance targeting. Additionally, we explore how direct mail complements digital marketing efforts, attributing and measuring success, and the importance of continuous testing to improve campaign performance.

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Transcript

0:08

Hi, I'm Cheryl Broome, CEO of Gradcom and host of higher ed Conversations sponsored by Edtech Connect. And today I have a great Gaston who is joining me from his boat in Oceanside harbor, which, crazy, is where I live. I live in Oceanside, so we're just a couple miles apart when we're talking, but he was literally out at sea while we were having the conversation. We talked all things direct mail. So I do a lot of work with Modern postcard, which is a print and mail shop here in Carlsbad, California, and they help me serve my clients with great direct mail campaign pieces. And we're just having a ton of success lately with some of the innovative things that we're doing with direct mail. And I thought, gosh, it'd be great to have someone on to give some others throughout the country who listen to this podcast, ideas on how to better target potential students using direct mail and just how to set up creative materials better, how to test those materials, and how to actually drive enrollments by using mail pieces. So I'm really pleased today to have Keith Goodman, who is the vice president of corporate sales and marketing with Modern postcard on the podcast. I learned a lot talking to him, and I finally figured out why I keep getting coupons for a new wine shop in town in my mailbox every week, Keith dives deep in into the different databases they use to mine information about consumer behavior and give some tips on how colleges can use that information for their own marketing as well. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I do. Keith, it's so great to have you on the podcast today. Well, thanks. Great to be here. And for those of you listening to the podcast rather than watching it on YouTube, Keith is on a boat. And we just discovered he is on a boat in my hometown of Oceanside, California, which is really exciting. Well, they were doing a lot of construction in the office today, so I thought, what a great excuse to come down to the boat and work from the boat. Well, this is a first for me. I've never interviewed someone on a boat before, so I don't know if it's gonna be any different than any other interview, but it's kind of exciting to see your background. I haven't started drinking rub yet.

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00 too. Well, I am really excited to have you on the podcast because we've done so many interviews and a lot of episodes around digital marketing. But a lot of the colleges that we work with do a lot of traditional and direct mail, and that is your expertise. So I'm really excited to talk to you about that today. Well, thank you. I'm excited to talk about it. It's one of the things right now, direct mail is making a huge comeback, not only in education, but across almost all industries. But when you look at the variety of different audiences in the education industry, especially higher education, it works very well because you really, because of how targeted it is, you can have different designs, different messages to each of your individual markets. So it makes it extremely effective. Whereas in a lot of digital programs, you don't really know for sure who will be seeing the ad. You might have different selects put in, but anybody can see those ads. And in direct mail, you have a lot more control over who's actually getting each version right. In fact, just today I was talking to a client who, we're recording this and it's May 1, and they want to market some summer classes to parents of high school students. And the first thing I thought is direct mail, like, that's the way we're going to reach them because we're going to be able to find out those households in your area that have teenagers at home. Well, yeah, and when you look at the amount of data that is available associated to a postal address versus an online Persona, it's enormous. There's 1500 different fields of information associated with a postal address and the people within that house where it might just be a couple hundred of different fields of digital information or demographic information that would be associated with a digital id. When you look at all of the purchases take place in a home versus just online or certain account or under a certain ip, you have a tremendous amount of activity to draw from. You have all the credit card information, you have the actual house information, you have all the people within the household. So everything is combined into this one household. So it gives you a really deep breath of information to draw your data from. What are some of those fields that, that we can ask for? I mean, we know, like, for example, I know I can ask for households with teenagers. And what are some of the other things that you see your clients asking for when running campaigns? Well, you have all the basic demographics. You know, that's a given. So you have income, you have home value, presence of children, ages of children, you have net worth income. But then when you start to get into lifestyle information, it opens up a whole new range. So now you have people that are into fitness, are into health, well being, different activities, different. They might be in the music, they might be listening to music, they might be playing music, spectator sports, playing sports, the types of cars they drive, the distance they are from different schools, whether a lot of them, there's lists that are associated with ADA members. So people that have certain disabilities, things like that, that would open them up for new opportunities and new programs within a school. So all these different lists are available that help you identify people. That would be the best possible prospects for certain unique programs that these schools offer. So if schools are offering something unique and different, it's a great way for them to be able to marry that to somebody that would be likely to take advantage of that program. Oh, yeah. Do they have boat owners on their list? Yes. As a matter of fact, we're actually talking to a satellite Internet company about identifying all the people that have boats over 25ft in the country so they can target them with satellite Internet technology. Wow, that's fascinating. And I love this. I love how granular you can get with the targeting, because the type of success that we're seeing in campaigns really are those campaigns that take a particular program and then try to find individuals who are most likely to be interested in that program. So five or ten years ago, our colleges were all about brand marketing. They're just throwing their name out as often as they can, but now they're coming to us and they're saying, you know, we have a new class to certify people to be breastfeeding nutritionists. And so then we have to think like, okay, what type of person wants to get certified to be like a nutritionist for a woman who is breastfeeding? And so you can help identify maybe lifestyle interests and things like nutrition and, and gender and age that might help narrow it down so you could do more targeted marketing. Absolutely. And a lot of it, most of it is self reported. So these would be people that are into natural living, healthy living, have already expressed interest in homeopathic remedies, things like that, where this would fall right into their existing interests and certain age ranges. And then we can also combine that with distance as well as drive time to the university or the college. That's a great tip. You know, I had never thought about distance and drive time, particularly for programs that are in person. Yep. One of the key things about drive time is here. Something would be 15 miles away or 20 miles away. But if it's in a traffic, certain traffic pattern, people ask, how far is something? And, you know, when you're in rural Nevada, you know, Nebraska or Kansas, you say that's 40 miles away. So it's about 30 minutes in southern California, 15 miles away, could be an hour and a half. Yeah. So being able to determine drive time is really, really important. So it's not just distance radius, but being able to apply a drive time filter on top of that really helps with the targeting as well. Wow, what a fascinating thing. I have never even considered a drive time filter. That's fascinating. We actually came up with that about this is when I had my own data company, 25, 28 years ago. We applied a drive time filter to our data, became very, very popular. I mean, that is, even if you're in a big metropolitan area, that's even a message that you could incorporate into the mail piece itself. Like, we are within a half an hour drive time, or we're just 15 minutes away. We've done that before to where we've done bands around the location based on the different drive time. So we pull, everybody that was in ten minutes got this message. Everybody was in 20 minutes got this message. Everybody that was in 30 minutes got this message. So everybody could get a unique message associated with how far the distance is. Location. Wow. That's fantastic. What a great idea. Talk about segmentation. I mean, now you're. You're drawing, you know, circles around distance and changing just one little message to make it more personalized. And that personalization is becoming more and more important in marketing. Everybody's inundated with marketing messages right now. So the more personalized you can make it, the better. And the best thing about direct mail is nobody is getting deluge right now with too much direct mail. Yeah. So we used to get 30, 40, 50 pieces a day in the mail. Now people get 3456. So the likelihood that mail piece being read is much, much higher than it's ever been. Yeah. Interesting. All these databases that you mine data from, are they from credit cards? Like, where does all this information come from? No, the data comes from hundreds of different sources. And credit card companies don't, like, say, hey, here's everything that you bought. So we know Cheryl bought all this stuff last month. Now, what their classifications? So they know that if you're buying healthy foods or you say you're spending money on international travel, they know that you're in international travel. So you would get classified as somebody who travels internationally. If you're into different, you buy season tickets for sports or theater music, you're classified as a music listener, sports spectator, those types of things. A lot of the information comes from loyalty programs, from markets. They always say, you are what you eat. Imagine what Ralph's can put together and bonds can put together based on what we buy at the store. So they now know whether you're a vegan, a vegetarian, a pescatarian. If you buy chips and beer on Sunday morning in the fall, you're a football fan. So they start to build all these models out, and they're able to do that very, very effectively. You know, you start buying prenatal vitamins. Ah. Babies on the way. And now it's diapers. The baby's here. So they start to build all these models off of what we buy in the market. So those loyalty programs, you put your phone up and like Ralph Sarvant's, I mean, you're not just like saving a little bit of money, but they're tracking the type of things that you buy. Yeah. They're paying you for the data. Yeah, that's what they do. So that way they can turn around and sell that. Here's another thing. Warranties, the warranty on your, on your television, they don't, they don't need, you don't need the warranty card. All you need is the receipt from where you bought your tv at Costco, and you show them the receipt. It's under warranty. That's it. If you get the extended warranty, it's on your receipt, too, from Costco or whatever store you buy it. Look at the questions they ask you on those warranty cards. What do you like watching on tv? Do you like watching movies? Do you like watching sports? What kind of sports? Like watching, what kind of movies do you like watching? Do you have a home theater at home? You know, if you don't, if you put. No. Imagine who you're going to start getting ads from. All the local home theater companies are going to want to sell you home theater systems, and they ask you what your cable provider is. So if you say spectrum, you're going to get offers from everybody else. So they sell that data. And that's just another data acquisition point. So surveys, sweepstakes, census data, all that is all compiled in these files. That's fascinating. We just had a total wine open in Encinitas. And so for, so we'll talk in time because I'm in southern California. Encinitas ranch golf course. Yeah, it's, no, it's actually by the target in Encinitas off, what is it? Locadia Boulevard and El Camino real. So it's like this giant new wine store. Oh, it's a store. I thought it was a wine event that. No, it's a big store and it's got like every wine. It's more than wine. It's like, it's like a Costco for alcohol. And it's like 8 miles from Oceanside, which could be twelve minutes or it could be 45, depending on the day and the time. And I started to get all these coupons for total wine and I just was like, oh, wow. Total wine must be just like blanket mealing all of north County, San Diego with their new store. I probably buy so much wine at Vaughn's that total wine's like, let's send her some coupons. And it got me to drive down there, by the way, if you. You should go there. You're not that far. It's got, it's a great story. Really good deals. I like Bevmo. Bevmo? Yeah, it's like Bevmo on steroids. Like it's a whole nother. I like Ro. Yeah, that fits the boat absolutely well, I love that. So, you know, these are type of things. Clearly, in digital marketing you have a lot of targeting options but not nearly as many as what I'm hearing you talk about for direct mail. Right? Yeah. There's just a tremendous amount of data that's out there. And then the other thing is there's so much versatility on the actual formats of the pieces that are available in direct mail. And the other thing is, it has a lifetime that no other advertising does. Have you ever tried to save a digital ad? No. Maybe screenshot it if I'm really interesting. Yeah, that's it. And then you lose all the interactivity and it's in your pictures. It's, yeah. With a direct mail piece, you just stick in your cubby in the kitchen. It's there. Yeah. Done. And you come back and look at it later. Yeah. So it has that tactile. It's actually a physical piece of mail that can be filed and saved. And you look at it, you show it to others. It's easy to share. Where once a digital ad displays very few people ever save an ad, let alone read them, you know, and a lot of people say, well, digital is so much cheaper. It isn't. It isn't because you really want to look at what was the actual cost of acquisition, not the cost per impression. Right. And when you look at mailing or using digital programs most of the time you're looking at accounts it's in the hundreds of thousands or millions of impressions. And granted, they might only be a penny a piece but if it takes 5000 impressions or 10,000 impressions to get a response it would be a lot cheaper to mail out. It might cost you $500 to get a response, and you might get one for $120 using direct mail, or dollar 60 getting direct mail, because instead of one in 10,000, you might be getting a one in 101 in 150. So 1% response rate or one and a half instead of a.001% response rate like you do in digital. So you really have to look at what is that actual true cost of acquisition and versus the cost of the impression. There's a lot of people say direct mail is too expensive, when in reality, it could be a lot cheaper than other types of advertising. And how do people do attribution? How have you seen it done? Well, with direct mail pieces. What are some things that colleges can think about? Oh, it's actually the easiest advertising to do, attribution of any, because you have the list. You know exactly who you mailed to. You say, okay, here's the 20,000 people emailed to, and you match them back. And you say, how many these people signed up? How many these people registered? Oh, look, out of the 20,246 registered. Now, here's where the big problem comes in. You have the digital team that's saying, hmm, they saw our digital ads, so we don't really know. Did they sign up because the digital ads or because of the direct mail? So there's a really easy solution. You take the 20,000 names and you carve 4000 out. You say, we're only going to mail 16, or you order 24, and you mail 20, and then you do the match back of the 20,000 you mailed to and the 4000 you didn't mail to. And you say, okay, out of the 20,000 we mailed to, we got a 1.2% response rate. So that's pretty good. So 1.2% of the people that got the mail fees actually signed up for a catalog. Maybe they didn't register, but they signed up for catalog. And then you do the match back of the 4000 that didn't make that, got the digital advertising, so they got everything else, and they had a 0.3% response rate. So now you say, hey, great job, digital team. You got a 0.3% response rate, and then the incremental lift provided by the direct mail is a 0.9%. So it might not be the full 1.2% because that 0.3% might have signed up anyways. Now, here's the other factor is you start to have where one plus one equals three. So imagine yourself as a consumer, and you get a mail piece that talks about these great new programs that the local college has, and you're thinking, that's pretty cool. I've kind of always wanted to learn about european cooking, or I've wanted to get my fitness certification, or I've wanted to, you know, get my EMT, whatever it is, and it sits in the cut and you don't do anything about it. Out of sight, out of mind. And three days later, the digital ad comes across. Ah, that's right, I was interested in this. And you click the digital ad to sign up because it's a lot easier now. You don't have to type in the URL. So it was the direct mail piece that did the heavy lifting and got you interested in it, but then it was the digital ad that gave you a convenient way to convert and sign up. So you have that combination of a very content rich promotional piece that really can tell a story, get somebody engaged and want to do it and create the demand. And then you have the digital ad that gives them the convenient way to convert. So by using the two together, it's one plus one equals three. That's great. That's great. And that's, I mean, that's what, how a campaign should work is. You want to have multiple touch points, and it becomes more affordable when you're thoughtful about the targeting. So it goes back to the original conversation. You're looking at the program. You figure out who's interested in it. You purchased the list based on their past behaviors and their interests. Now you have an affordable campaign that you can do both in print and in digital. Exactly. Yeah, that's great. What about creative? I know you've worked with so many colleges and universities. Do you have any advice on how to make your pieces stand out? What should we be thinking about? I do. And a lot of people say, I'll ask, what's better right now, a letter or a postcard. Okay, that's great. And the answer is yes. How do higher education decision makers find the right solution when technology evolves at light speed? Well, we usually start with our network. Edtech Connect is the network that's democratizing the higher ed technology conversation. Edtech Connect is free, so anyone with a email address can sign up and list the software and services they use in their role at their school. Once you're in, you can find out what solutions similar schools are doing all over the country. Whether you're looking to find a hot new AI tool or maybe learn options, you have to upgrade your campus search engine or even get to your short list of marketing solution vendors, edtechConnect is the place to go. So visit edtechconnect.com and set up your free profile to get a pulse for what's happening with higher ed technology today. Here's the thing, it has to have graphical impact. Look, even the old people today are Gen Xers. That's weird. That's a scary thought. That's a scary thought. Gen Xers are now in their sixties. Yeah, they wouldn't got old on us. And I'm like, right on the border, Gen X and baby boomers. So I'm like right on the cusp. But these are people that grew up with MTV, early adopters in technology. They want information now and they have, they're now over overwhelmed by messages, overwhelmed by activity. And that's on the old side. Then you have, you know, Gen Y, Gen Z, millennials, you know, you have the younger generations, they are completely overwhelmed by digital. It's even gotten to the point where, you know, Facebook has become the new MySpace. That's true. And once, once parents get on that, whatever the platform is, the kids have no interest in being there anymore. And it's starting to happen to Instagram now. So they're all kind of going through their cycles. The kids of all, I don't want to say the kids, but the younger generations are very, very adept at ad blockers. They've got ad blockers on their phones, on their desktops, on their tablets. They don't even look at their email anymore. And people started trying to reach them on text. And it's just not an acceptable thing to text somebody a business proposition or to advertise using text. That's kind of for communication only. And they're just very overwhelmed by digital media right now. And they're actually responding extremely well. Direct mail because it's at their own leisure. Right. It's kind of a cool retro thing. And because of how targeted it is, the pieces they're getting actually apply to them. You know, they're not getting ads for pool cleaning. They don't have, they're getting things that actually interest them because to the data, right. So my recommendation is whether you use letters or whether you use postcards or self mailers, make them graphical in nature, have that graphical impact and capture somebody's attention, right. And too many times people will take a letter, stick it on a postcard, say, well, we used to mail a letter and then they have this copy heavy postcard that really doesn't have any graphical impact. And then wonder why it failed. Yeah. So you have to capture somebody's attention, and the best way to capture somebody's attention is something that is near and dear to them. Right. And people always try to sell their product or service or in colleges, they try to sell their program on the mail piece. You just want to get the person to sign up for something, get them to come to an open house, an open campus day, have them get a catalog, have them talk to a counselor, drive that first activity that would lead to them signing up. Maybe let them know about a new student aid program. You know, sign up for this and look at this new world of information that's at your fingertips. But, you know, we, based on all the information we have on you, you would, you would qualify for the student aid program. Really easy to apply, and then we can talk to you about all the different options at your disposal. But get that first engagement. Until you have that first engagement, it's really, really hard to sell a complete curriculum on a mail piece. And too many universities try to sell that for college campuses try to sell that, the curriculum and not that first engagement. I know I have so many college presidents where I'm like, nobody's going to come sign up for an associate degree in nursing because they saw your Facebook ad. It's like a whole, it's a whole journey somebody takes. Right. And the thing is somebody would sign up for nursing because they're not happy with their life the way it is now. Right. You know, there. And we were doing a program for national university a while ago, their MBA program. And what we did is we targeted people with an undergraduate degree in a business related topic that were underachievers. So we looked at people that were making less than$40,000 a year. So this is somebody that spent four or five years in college, spent a lot of their money or their parents money. Right. Got a degree, and they're not quite living the lifestyle that they expected. Right. Something fell apart, and it was all about lifestyle. It's all about, you know, what's keeping you from doing the things you really want to do. Yeah. Here's a great opportunity. And we did that for law school. We did it for business school. We did it for different programs, and it did very, very well. It got people to come to these open houses and learn about the programs, but it was more about kind of that pain point, identifying a pain point that somebody has. And then how do you eliminate that pain from your life? Well, here's, here's an option. Right? So when you. Instead of trying to say, hey, this is a great program, and you, you know, it's only a year and a half. You can become a nurse, and nursing is wonderful, and why would somebody want to do that? That's what you have to look at. What would be the driving force? I mean, I don't know. A lot of people that look at what a nurse does. Anybody's been in the hospital. Marketing. I don't want to touch people. Nobody. This was fun, I think. Sorry to any of the nurses that are watching. I love what you do. Yeah. It's such a good reminder that when you are marketing, you need to put the person you're marketing to first. It's not our program and our services. I always say, be the consumer. Imagine you getting mail. And in my seminars, you haven't been to one of them yet, but I have a whole section where I talk about, don't talk about yourself. Don't talk about how great your company is. Nobody cares. It's all about what's in it for them. Identify with the needs of your recipient, and then what are the benefits to them that will fix their problem. Right. And then marketers have always been taught features and benefits. Focus on features and benefits. Features and benefits. Go to the benefit first. Nashville made the mistake of promoting the fact that they have these. I forgot what they called it, but they were these six week courses that were these, like, intensive, where you. You only took one class at a time, but there's only six weeks long, but you would go like 3 hours a day, and then you had 3 hours of study time each day. And these were for working people, and you would, in the same amount of time, you get the same amount of credits, but you would do it one class at a time. But they never talked about, why would. You want to put your. Why would you want to do that? Why would you want to do it? Right. You know, and. And once they talk about the benefit, that it gives you the flexibility to very quickly take these courses that you need to take. And really, we found that if you put all your focus in one class instead of three or four different classes at the same time, you actually complete the course faster and you have better retention and recall. So if they had said, look, the problem with taking multiple classes is this. You don't remember it, and it's very hard to test at the end, and it's. It takes too much study time. If we compress it, it actually takes less of your time to complete the same curriculum. Right. That's why we do what we do. Right. So identify the pain point. Fix it with the benefits. Yeah. And then talk about the features after you've already shared the benefits. And that's a perfect example because for, I mean, if their target audience is working adults, I mean, your pain point is time. It's just time and money. Like, do you really want to give up what little time you have in your schedule to invest in more education? And so if they. And that was their main target were working people, people that already had careers and they were trying to help them better their careers through their educational program. So these were people getting their mbas. Yeah. And it's the same with our community college clients. Like, most. Most people coming back to community college right now are working adults. And, you know, these are the type of messages we should be thinking about because they're making. They're sacrificing time because they have the hope that that sacrifice is going to get them more money or more freedom and more opportunities. So we've got to convince them it's worth their time. And it's hard to do that in a tiny little digital ad. Yeah. What percentage of people going to community colleges today are there because it's mandatory curriculum to get a degree or because it's. I always wanted to learn this. I always thought it'd really be cool if I could. And then I go back to school. Well, and there are a lot of programs that are set up just for people like that. Like, you could go over to Tamir Costa. You can learn to make beer. You can become a wine taster, and you could do all these fun classes, and they're just commercial fun. Cooking. Yeah. And a lot of them are serious classes. Like, I thought of going back and taking math again. Oh, wow. You're a brave man. Navigation. I work on the boat all the time, and I figure stuff out to build things. And I'm almost thinking of going back, taking, like, an engineering class, mechanical engineering, because there's parts as an old boat, I have to remanufactured parts and have parts machined. So being able to actually draw the parts out myself and take those machines out. So I thought about going back and going back to school for those types of classes. So it's serious curriculum, but it's more of to support the things that I like to do and I plan on doing for my next career. Well, I am going to pass on to the director of marketing at Miracosta that there are a couple hundred people down in Oceanside harbor that might like a math class. I bet she'd be excited to hear that. Can you get mail on a boat? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. Oh, no, you get a Po box. You get a. Okay. Yeah, you have to get a PO box here. But it's funny. I took calculus in high school. Heck if I can remember any of it. I know. No way. But this is a practical application. That's right. Exactly. One of the things I've been having success with, with some of my clients with direct mail is retargeting. So we will have Pixel put on a website, and then a postcard will be mailed to those people who can be identified. And what we're using those postcards for, and you've already touched on this, is either for an open house. So it's not just a random postcard with more information about the college. It's inviting people to an open house, or it's an invitation to make a connection with an academic counselor. And we're having such great success with these retargeting postcards. Events are up. Counseling appointments are up. So it's been a really great tactic for us. That's great. And that's one of things that direct mail really stands out on, too, now. And the new technology advances make programs like that possible. And for the people in the audience that don't quite know what the postal retargeting is, we've all seen digital retargeting. You go to a website, and then they bombard you with digital ads for eternity, and you get 5100 digital ads. And the problem with that is, say, we go on 2030 sites a day. Yeah, we see a lot of digital ads. So we constantly see, whenever we're doing searches, all the ads are popping up from all the different sites we've been to. Well, postal retargeting is a tag that's placed on the site that instead of grabbing an ip address and sending you a digital ad, we're actually able to take a first party cookie and convert that to a postal address and then send a card out the next day. So you now have. We can now send a postcard driving people to a certain activity, and it can be done per page. So the open house page, the open house cards might come to somebody who is within a certain distance of the school, and you say, okay, we want everybody within 20 miles or in these 28 zip codes would all get a card if they came to this college's website. Right. And it could be only people that actually went and looked at the. The different classes are available or only a certain category of classes that are available. So they're going through a certain portion of the catalog and they say, okay, only people that went to any business related subjects would actually get this card. Yeah. If they went to other maybe language associated classes or curriculum, they would get this card. So it allows you to have different cards going to different groups. Yeah. And I love it. And what we're hearing from clients is at these open houses, people are carrying the postcard. They're like, they bring it with them to the open house. They know that that's how they got there. So we're having great luck with that. Awesome. Yeah. Well, as we wrap up our conversation and you hit the

04: 39:35

00 hour on your boat, any other tips or tricks that you want to share with the market? Yeah, one big one. All the time, people ask, well, do you think this is a good idea? Could be. I've seen some crazy stuff work in my time. I've been in this industry for 30 years. I have sat down with a client and said, I don't think it's going to work, but let's try it. And it worked great. And that's how I learned. Test, test, test all the time. Don't stop testing. If somebody comes up with an idea and it has some weight, try it. It doesn't mean it mail the equal amount, but once you have, you're going to test into your champion piece. You're going to have a certain piece that works really well because you've tested it into that position. And once you have that, constantly test against it. Create a challenge every time you mail. So you might mail 50,000 of your champion, mail 10,000 of a challenger and see, percentage wise, if you can beat that champion, and that's how you end up beating the champion is constantly testing and testing. Great. That is great advice. And this is something that I think a lot of college marketers are guilty of not doing because they're so busy that they don't take the time to test. But it doesn't, it doesn't take that much time to do that. No, it doesn't. And we've had people in the beginning, their cost of acquisition was$200, and after a year of testing, we brought that cost of acquisition to 80, 60, 50. The payoff on constant testing is enormous. Right. So do it. So that is my closing piece of advice. Well, I love it, and I've learned so much for you, Keith. Thank you so much. And I'm going to start paying attention to more to the pieces I get in the mail and think about, okay, what are my behaviors triggering that? I'm getting these. Hey, by the way, we're doing a live seminar here in June in San Diego. Oh, great. You've got to come down to it. I would love to. Okay. The Sheraton Mission Valley, I think. June 18. June 18. All right, I'm going to write it down. All right. June 18. And maybe some of our San Diego clients would like to come and join me, so I'll extend the invitation to them. Yeah. And then you could take us out on your boat. We'll talk. You don't even have to wait that long to come out on the boat. Well, thank you so much, Keith. It's been a great conversation. I've learned a lot talking from you, and I'm sure our college marketers have as well. All right, thanks. And that wraps up this episode of the Higher Education Conversations podcast. I'm host and Gradcom CEO Cheryl Broome. A big thank you to our sponsor, edtech Connect. Edtech Connect is free, so anyone with the email address can sign up and list the software and services they use in their role at their school. So visit edtechconnect.com and set up your free profile to get a pulse for what's happening with higher ed technology today. And while you're online, take a few minutes to leave our podcast, a five star review. It will help other colleges and universities find us and learn from the great experts we have on the show. That's it for now. Until next time.