Marketing and Bulk Mail Out

Marketing and Bulk Mail Out

April 23, 2007

Last Revised: May 23, 2012 4:50 PM

This Company Policy IS THE most fundamental to our expansion, starting with the new era in 2007, with new executives including Clifford Woods who has taken over Marketing in 2008, and then became Executive Director in 2008.

"Bulk Mail Out" is now defined to include messages sent by either electronic or post office -- eMail or Postal Mail. The word "bulk" used here indicates that the MESSAGE in the "mail" is generally the same for many different recipients -- although some parts of the message may be customized mechanically (by inserting a code to be replaced with the first name, or other data, from a database source).

[With the arrival of Cliff Woods, we have started to use and explore more use of massive bulk eMail to purchased lists -- including some tests of sending out from a purchased list of 2,000,000 names. Prospectively, "Bulk Mail Out" will now be specifically used for these "Bulk eMail Out" messagess]

With him on board and a greatly expanded role for marketing and dissemination, you might say that THIS Company Policy provides the stairway to our success. Study this Company Policy well and make sure that you also click on every link to and study some other page referenced from this Policy.

In late 2008 our good friend, Dr. MSR Ayyangar, from India, was a house guest at Karl's home. At the end of that visit MSR and Karl, their spouses, signed a "Memorandum of Understanding" leading to an eventual collaboration of interests with MSR doing most of the manufacturing of products for sale, and Vibrant Life doing more/most of the marketing. Thus, marketing concepts are becoming even more important.

During early 2009, Dr. Ayyangar decided to write a Book and Karl has been assisting. That work, still not public at this writing, has a restricted web access HERE. (If you have the access credentials you can read a great deal more about that Book, and about Karl's comments that relate to that Book and to the "marketing" ideas on this and related pages.)

Our primary marketing method has been through the internet and the 100,000 web pages about heart disease, cancer and our breakthrough oral chelation data and products.

My understanding of the use of the word "book" within the Hubbard Management system indicates that our 100,000 web pages are our equivalent of two hundred fifty regular books (currently with some 300,000 pages of this collection being viewed by someone every month). Click on the link, above, for the details on how to measure the "book" equivalent of the 100,000 of Karl Loren's published web pages.

Can we say, then, that "Karl Loren's equivalent of 250 books published on the web achieve the status of about one new best seller every three months, based on the number of people who read (or browse) to each page of those "web-books?"(source)

The word "books"is a central issue in the marketing technology described by Mr. Hubbard who wrote about "books, paraphrased below with "web pages" replacing "books."

Web pages about heart disease and oral chelation viewed by the public interest them in oral chelation.
Their interest causes them to want oral chelation.
Such individuals contact us, by phone, letter or through various web page portals and the shopping cart.
If we handle these reaches intelligently, the web page reader reaches for more information or to make a purchase.
If this web page reader gets further good information, or good results from his purchase, he will want to repeat buy and disseminate our oral chelation.

Marketing

Virtually all of our stable income comes from step 4 above. The web pages have a Div 6 marketing function of contacting new people (and gathering their identities, including mailing address) as well as providing more information to those who have already visited some pages or made purchases (Div 2 marketing function for existing customers).

Those who are satisfied with the information or the results from the product disseminate to others and thus the cycle continues and expands. This is the very desirable "word of mouth promotion" which is the ultimate in effective promotion compared to any promo piece we could mail out. (Click the above link for vital data.) Mr. Hubbard wrote this about personal contact:

Personal Contact: This by far is the very best method of dissemination. It is better done on individual basis rather than talking to groups since there is the factor in groups of being able to escape by saying "they aren't talking to me." Personal contact then means just that. No matter whether it is done with friends and then to other people or secondarily to total strangers there is nothing better than personal contact.

Books: personal contact usually requires books to back it up.

HCOB 12 September 1959, Dissemination Tips, Page 60, OEC Vol 2.

In this day of computers and the internet, all 100,000 of our web pages are instantly available, 24/7, in every country on earth and to the large majority of people who already use computers and browse on line. Our books are "in print" and available. We need to find more ways to get more people to look at those pages.

If there is any simple explanation of what "Marketing" is for us -- it is there: We need to find more ways to get more people to look at those pages.

ALL the steps of Marketing as LRH describes them, above, are fairly well taken care of in our present Shipping area, Div. 4. It is only the FIRST step which is falling behind. It has not been enough to have Karl Loren PUBLISH 100,000 pages, someone then has to get people to look at those pages.

The link above (repeated here) shows that in the time between May 2007 and November 2007, there has been a 17% decrease in the viewing of these pages. At present (December 2007) we have no person in charge of that area for the Company. Steven Archibald was assigned into that area, but later left in bad standing. The previous person who had been in charge left the Company in bad standing, click HERE for that background. No matter how talented he may have been (and he was), and despite the fact that he was regarded as the most senior staff member in the Company, his unethical behavior and failure to take responsibility overshadowed all the good that had done and could have done. His quitting was a substantial blow to our marketing activity and only now are we about to replace him.

Mr. Clifford Woods is NOW responsible for this area and we are starting to see the results of his leadership in December 2008. Those results continued, in early 2009, to show the removal of people who had been, previously, holding down the stats of the Company.

These many web pages were historically not the first channel of marketing this Company used -- that being the period when Jean Ross and Karl Loren would travel a local circuit booking rooms in restaurants and community centers, Karl giving a live lecture on heart disease and Jean offering bottles of oral chelation for sale. After many dozens of these lectures being given this lecture then was recorded and the Company used that lecture on a cassette tape, even up to April 2007, as a free or purchased promotional piece. More than 100,000 of these lectures have been given out over the past 20+ years. That lecture, newly recorded has now been offered on a CD and is already sparking the new marketing revolution that has been started in 2007. Getting this CD distributed and listened to would be a primary activity of Marketing.

These lectures are organized around a precise Hubbard technology of dissemination which includes finding the "ruin" for your prospect:

A ruin is the source of an individual's downfall. It will be something or someone that is causing the person to be effect in a certain area of his existence or in general. Whatever is ruining an individual's life is what he will be striving to handle and to be cause over. All he needs to get him on the road to being causative over his ruin is the recognition that the technology of [oral chelation] will enable him to do so.

HCOPL 15 Dec 1979, Surveying For Department 17 Services, page 321 Mgt. Series 3.

There is a Hubbard Management System reference I have used repeatedly when planning my early lectures, the recorded lecture and all my web page writing.

The Dissemination Drill has four exact steps that must be done with a person you are disseminating to.

There is no set patter, nor any set words you say to the person.

There are four steps that must be accomplished with the individual, and they are listed in the order that they should be done:

Contact the individual: This is plain and simple. It just means making a personal contact with someone, whether you approach them or they approach you.
Handle: If the person is wide open to [oral chelation] and reaching, this step can be omitted as there is nothing to handle. Handle is to handle any attacks, antagonism, challenge or hostility that the individual might express toward you and/or [oral chelation or Karl Loren]. Definition of "handle": to control, direct. "Handle" implies directing an acquired skill to the accomplishment of immediate ends. Once the individual has been handled you then --
3. Salvage: Definition of salvage: "to save from ruin." Before you can save someone from ruin, you must find out what their own personal ruin is. This is basically -- What is ruining them? What is messing them up? It must be a condition that is real to the individual as an unwanted condition or one that can be made real to him.
Bring to understanding: Once the person is aware of the ruin, you bring about an understanding that [oral chelation] can handle the condition found in 3. This is done by simply stating [oral chelation] can, or by using data to show how it can. It's at the right moment on this step that one hands the person a ...card and directs him to the [needed further source of products or information].

HCOPL 23 October 1965, Dissemination Drill, Page 214, OEC Vol 2.

This technology is central to our Marketing efforts and I have issued my own explanation of it HERE.

"Understanding" as used above us a tern within the "Awareness Scale" as also developed by Mr. Hubbard. The part of that total scale from "ruin" to "understanding" give the further steps to the above procedure:

Ruin

Effect

Fear of Worsening

Need of Change

Demand for Improvement

Hope

Help

Recognition

Communication

Perception

Orientation

Understandings

The use of these terms and the technique of applying them in either a personal conversation or in a printed promotional piece are described HERE.

When you do this "one-on-one" you have the advantage of perceiving the reactions of the other person.

When you create promotional and marketing material to be printed or placed on TV or the Web, you have to find out what are the common realities for each of the different awareness characteristics listed above. If you were doing the above drill on one person, personally, you would use good two-way communication to ask questions and good observational skills to UNDERSTAND responses from the person. Without that personal and direct communication with one person you must use surveys to find out what people are thinking or use your own understanding of the public to predict just what are the "ruins" and other terms that will cause people to move along on this scale.

You could, then, assert that heart disease is ruining the lives of your readers. Since heart disease is the cause of death for millions of people, this is very likely a safe "prediction" type of "ruin" that you can make real to a person, quoting whatever facts you get to drive this point home.

Once the "ruin" is established and you have someone's attention (in a personal conversation) you can go on. When you deal with printed material you have to test your material to see if it actually convinces (by survey for instance) a reader that the ruin you want to establish seems real to him.

Then you go on, in your verbal conversation or in your printed material to establish what are the "effects" of that ruin on a person, such as "loss of the wage earner in the family," etc. Listen to my recorded lecture on oral chelation for an example of how I utilize these terms, in sequence, from the beginning to the end of the lecture.

You continue to write text that will establish each of these awareness levels, one after the other, until you arrive at the point where the person is reaching for help. He can continue to learn more about oral chelation, but at this point he would usually be ready to make a purchase and experience the help he is seeking.

Marketing and promotion, then, is an activity of finding people who can be brought up in their awareness levels from wherever they are to a state of seeking help from us. That is the job of our marketing and promotional materials.

Our web-based marketing includes whatever it takes to improve the statistics for "page "views and search engine rankings for our 100,000 web pages.

Good pages lead viewers to continue clicking on links for more information and winding up on the shopping cart or on the "write-to-Karl-Loren" page where they provide their name and address and request more information including their possible request for a personal answer to a health question.

For instance, for the four week period ending with April 27, 2007, here are the average number of daily "page views" for all our web sites:

4/9/07	4/13/07	4/20/07	4/27/07
13,037	14,342	15,231	16,027

Counting April 9, 2007 as the base, the statistics for April 27th are up 15%. This would appear to be caused by various marketing activities in the weeks before this period. Marketing must always look for ways to measure the results of marketing actions.

The new VBMaster Program that is now in development must include electronically-aided methods of gathering statistics such as "page views" and "number of "Source XX terminals who have purchased from $XX to $XXY" (more explained below).

Finding ways to measure the results is the other side of predicting the results from any marketing campaign, including direct mail, Google Ad Words, advertising, etc.

Prediction

Mr. Hubbard uses the term "prediction" often. Here are some references:

You can predict what is going to happen far in advance of the occurrence, using statistics.

High book sales [read "high page views"] mean eventual prosperity. Low book sales mean eventual Emergency all along the line.

HCO PL 6 Nov 1966R, Statistic Interpretation Statistic Analysis, OEC 0, Page 123

Outpoints are more than useful in prediction.

The whole reason one does a data analysis and a situation analysis is to predict.

The biggest outpoint would be a missing ideal scene, the next biggest would be a correct statistic for it. [Notice that we do not have any regular statistic reported on page views, despite the critical and central importance of that statistic.]

If these are missing then prediction can become a matter of telling fortunes with bamboo sticks. [Notice that as of now I do not think any person working in Div 4 has any clue about the central predictive value and need for this statistic and a person who is responsible to keep it on the increase.]

One predicts in order to continue the viability of an organism, an individual, a group, an organization, a state or nation or planet, or to estimate the future of anything.

HCO PL 7 July 1970, Working and Managing, Pg. 329 Mgt. Series 1

Prediction from data is an essential part of evaluation. "This datum is an outpoint -- it shouldn't be, peculiar." Now it will predict more data.

You have to be so hot that you will notice something is an outpoint -- it's a wild outpoint of some kind or another - except its magnitude, size or datum. How important is this datum? The evaluation of importance is one of the more difficult things people do. They have a tendency to consider things a monotone importance. You have to train yourself out of that.

HCOPL 15 March 1977RA, Evaluation: The Situation, page 611 Mgt Series 1

When prediction is out, expansion becomes impossible to do without collapse.

HCOPL 19 March 1971 R, Personnel Prediction, Pg. 78, Mgt. Series 2

Once the action is begun, part of the prediction is that it will require continuous guiding, handling and pounding to make it come true.

HCOPL 19 March 1971 R, Personnel Prediction, Pg. 78, Mgt. Series 2

Marketing should be and can be very scientific when and as "prediction" is entered onto the scene.

I'll use the example of a bulk mail project.

That project includes selection of a mailing list of names (including careful selection of the criteria for the names to be on the list) and a mail piece to be mailed. The first and vital prediction needed is for the In Charge to predict what will be the "response rate" to the mailing. It is also necessary to carefully define what that "response" should be in order to count the number of responses.

Print Marketing campaigns must include a code number printed on the mailing piece so that, with this simple code, the mail piece can be easily identified when a person calls. The marketing campaign may include ONLY one mail piece, or several, but a "source" code is then assigned (in some sequential order carefully maintained) so that all responses to that campaign get a database record of the "source" of that name. [Was this done for the Christmas Campaign for 2007?]

When we send out a mailing we should expect that most of the responses will come in within a few weeks. It would be possible, however, for a marketing campaign to reach someone who does not respond until much later. No matter WHEN a person responds, if we can track that response to a marketing campaign with a code number, that response, that person, must have that code number as part of his database record.

When someone gets a mailing piece and doesn't respond, but then receives a second mailing piece (different marketing campaign) we would generally credit the more recent campaign (and its source code) as the cause of the response. In some cases a person may get a mailing, not respond to it directly, but visit the web site and come into us as a new person through some established line such as the "write-to-Karl-Loren" web pages that offer literature in return for a name and address into out database. If there is some logical source code other than the "write-to-Karl-Loren" page, that can be applied for that person (if he originates something like that).

The "universe" of names to whom a direct mailing has been sent is relatively fixed in number. (If we purchase 10,000 names, do the mailing and get back 500 mail pieces marked "not deliverable" that number should be reduced from the "universe" of the list used.) We must keep these lists intact and unchanged so we can inspect that at any future time. The response rate will always be the count (number) of names placed in our database that came to us because of a specific marketing campaign. If the original mailing list contained 25,000 names, there are no bad-address returns, and we get 500 responses, the return rate is 2% -- about average for many mailings.

The industry averages are instructive. Out of the 2% response to the first promotional mailing it is still true that many of those responders STILL do not purchase. They received the original mailing, they got references to the web pages, they received the CD Lecture and informational packet as a result of the original response, but statistically many of them STILL do not buy.

It is generally wise, then, to always plan for follow-up promotions especially aimed at those who respond to some earlier mailing -- and to plan a series of them. These will be more economical to handle since the original list sent to many thousands at considerable cost is now reduced to the 2% who responded initially. The second, third and fourth mailings can now be planned for in-house color printing, even at relatively high per-piece cost since this mailing is targeted so precisely:

Dear John,

On Wednesday, June 6, 2007, I sent you the lecture on CD by Karl Loren and a informational pack of materials.

If you did not get it, please do give me a call on my toll free number and I'll send it immediately.

That CD Lecture contains life-saving information about how you can reduce the risks of heart attack and stroke. About 15 minutes into that lecture Karl Loren talks about the dangers of heavy metals in the body. This is such vital information that I thought I would just send you some printed material on the dangers of these heavy metals in your body.

Etc.

Etc.

Sincerely,

A mail piece might, for instance, ask the reader to phone a toll free number, request literature and provide an address so the literature can be mailed.

A "response" that leaves an incomplete message on our machine (no address) is NOT a response. The responses must fit our expectations which must be put in written form as part of the written Marketing Campaign.

Using a simple example of "phone calls received in response to the mailing" the Project I/C must predict the number of responses, usually as a percentage of the total mailing.

Bulk mailing campaigns often achieve response rates of 2% or even less -- even these lower than 2% can be very viable. An expected response rate of 5% would usually be unrealistic or a miracle.

The actual response rate would be influenced by many factors including the quality of the list of names, the quality of the mail piece, even the date of mailing.

Response Rate:

in a direct mail campaign, the percentage of recipients who responded. Response rate is a vital measurement of the success of any such campaign. The rule of thumb in the US and Europe is that typical response rate is 2%, but estimates in various industries range from a fraction of a percent to 4-5%. A major goal of promotional VDP is to generate higher response rates. (source)

Once the response rate is predicted it must be accurately measured. This measurement is a vital part of any marketing campaign. Without this measurement the prediction cannot be later judged for its accuracy. Budgets and money are spent on the basis of prediction and prediction gets better when tempered with the experience of past results.

Generally a marketing campaign would not end with the capturing of a new name -- a response. Generally there then needs to be a further prediction of how much conversion from name/prospect over to buyer takes place. (We can start with the definition of a "buyer" as any payment to us of $10 or more.) That prediction needs to be further made as to how many of the responses are converted into "customer (defined as more than $100 in purchases since starting). Then the responses should be further categorized into "repeat customer" (defined as purchases more than $500). Finally some number of those responses will purchase more than $1,000 and could be called a big customer.

I have analyzed our present database to see what categories our existing "sources" fall into. The results of that analysis are HERE.

There can and should be a category of "Very Big Customer" who has purchased $5,000 or more from us, accumulated during the entire period his name has been in our database.

At first these predictions may seem completely arbitrary and guess-work, but those will better serve us than not doing any guessing.

It is safe to predict that you will get a 2% response rate for a mailing, but then be sure to MEASURE to a high degree of detail (response rate = 1.935% or such based on exact data). When you have sufficient experience and feel that a promo piece or mailing list allows you to predict a different percentage rate of response, that is yours to justify.

The prediction of what number of responses will reach the category of "buyer," or "customer" or "repeat customer" or "big customer" or "very big customer" will be complex for someone who has never made these predictions. Nonetheless, the prediction must be made and the actual statistics gathered weekly to see what percentage of responses have fitted into each of these purchase categories, and how much total money has been paid from this same source of response for each category.

So, start with a hope/assumption that 25% of all the new names become "buyers" ( needs definition, subject to review and change $10 or more purchase within 90 days ?), then how much each people who have reached the status of customer buy in the first year (guess at $400 ?). This procedure goes on for each category and there must be a prediction of three data for each response:

What number of responses from each source code achieve the various categories? Also convert this number into a percentage rate for the number of responses?

and
What is the the total value of all purchases for each category for that source code?

and
How many days has it been for these people to achieve their status since the name was included in the database?

Database Analysis 66,535 Records Considered "Responses" VSD by Source by Category
SOURCE CODE: ALL	Date of Campaign All Campaigns	Number Mailed Unknown
	Number/Percent	Total Purchases
Count of Database More than $0.00	5,660 8.634% of responses	$4,214,484
Small Money $0.01 up to $9.99	55 .083% of responses	$190.08
Buyers $10 up to $99.99	1387/ 2.085% of responses	$82,745
Customers $100 up to $499.99	2693 4.047% of responses	$650,405
Repeat Customers $500 up to $999.99	700 1.052% of responses	$496,206
Big Customers $1,000 up to $4,999,99	684 1.020% of responses	$1,441,943
Very Big Customers $5,000+	141 .212 % of responses	$1,542,995
Grand Total

The above table is an interesting and revealing picture of our experience with many thousands of customers over many years.

First, note that out of 66,535 names in our database, only 5,660, or 8.5% have ever spent any money with us. If this history is valid for the future, we can see that even though we get as few as 2% of our mailings as a response, only perhaps 10% or less of them ever do anything except receive literature that costs considerable in postage and printing.

This is one reason why it is so vital to send out further mailing so those who respond once. We have already invested a substantial amount to get those response names and it will cost less to contact them the second time than to contact people on a brand new list.

The general rule within the Hubbard Management system has been to send out three mailings to the same list and if no money is received from someone, discard that person's name.

Another general rule with the Hubbard system is to spend about 20% of the Corrected Gross Income (weekly or any period) for marketing.

A revised way of looking at this newly published (in late 2008) "20% rule" is to see how it is applied to the money allocated for paying salaries -- the "salary sum."

More accurately, the salary sum, and the marketing expense cannot simply be each taken as 20% of the CGI. Rather, the "profit rate" needs to be also taken into account.

The simple 20% rule "assumes" that the product cost of our VSD is also 20% or less -- meaning that we have a "product sales cost of 20% or less" of the VSD (where it is measured on our daily stat report) or even more finely measured as 20% or less of the CGI.

A way of looking at this is to say that "20% of the income from a sale (actually CGI) can be taken for marketing. This is almost the same as saying that you need to project income for at least 5 times the cost of the marketing campaign in order to have a large enough target so that, when met, you can, again, take the 20% of that income for more marketing expense.

This is an interesting way of planning a marketing campaign:

We start, say, with a $5,000 budget. We know that the campaign must INCREASE sales by at least $20,000 and we then plan very carefully on what predictions will have to come true in order to realize the income of $20,000.

The next interesting thing about this table is that it almost seems that once a person decides to buy something from us, they are very likely to continue to buy more. Thus, the vast majority of people who responded originally did NOT purchase anything, but those 5,660 persons who did purchase something purchased a very large amount ($4,214,484) (this list goes back many years, so this is purchases over a long period of time). Looking at ONLY those who bought "something" the average purchase was $745.00.

When you look at the statistics for those 825 people who purchased at least $1,000 (or more), the total purchases is $2,985,000 or an average of $3,600 each!

Obviously once a customer has purchased $1,000 or more from us he is very likely, per our history, to buy much more and would be a prime target for special promotional mailings. When you add in that our Lexmark color printer is relatively economical when printing 1,000 or fewer copies (and very expensive, compared to out-sourced printing of larger quantities), and further add in the high speed of designing a small mailing aimed at a small number of customers. We can invest considerable time and energy in gathering additional personalized data about THIS list, customized our small promotional and marketing items and expect to archive very good results. I gave an example of this above.

The very large customer (who buys $5,000 or more from us, represents about 0.2% of those who originally respond to our promotions. In the table above there were 141 of this category of person, spending an average of $10,900 each with us.

Such a very important customer is worthy of a great deal of special attention!

When it comes to predicting the results from a NEW mailing or campaign, the above table can be used as a base. Keep in mind, however, that most of the large customers had been buying from us for many years -- that such large sales do not likely come in the first couple years. On the other hand, we have better control over our marketing now and should reach the higher range of past results.

This table is shown HERE.

Marketing can and should be designed that gets MORE of those who respond to some campaign to become repeat customers, then even larger buyers since they turn out to be responsible for such a large portion of our total sales.

The above table looked at ALL the names in our database -- all responses to one or another of our many marketing campaigns.

When you look at one particular campaign, the results could be very different. That is where the skill and judgment of the In Charge of a campaign enters in.

For instance, at some time, long ago, VL used a mailing list from subscribers to a magazine called "Grit." The number in the mailing is long lost, but we still have 78 records of responses from that mailing. Those 78 people have purchased a total of $44,606 from us, including 8 of those people, representing only 10% of the responses, purchased $22,337 from us, or 48% of the total purchases made by people who responded from this list.

It is clear, again, that once we get a response from some promotion, some number of those responses wind up being far more important to us than their percent of the total responses would seem to indicate.

The conclusion I draw from this is the very high importance of continued high-quality and high-quantity promotion sent to those specific customers who pass a "threshold" of some amount -=- perhaps once they purchase $100 or more they show that they are very likely to buy much more.

The Marketing Executive then feels confident when he approaches the owner and says:

I have a marketing campaign which involves the bulk mailing of 25,000 post cards, over a five week period (5,000 pieces per week) to a list of people said to be interested in health subjects. The campaign costs $2,000 including cost of printing all 25,000 cards, full color, mailing house handling, postage (at $1,200 per week) for a total five week cost of $10,000.

I predict a 2% response rate of web page offer forms or phone calls, or 500 responses from the 25,000 mailings. The full details of my predictions are based pm the historical data we have from our entire database and that is shown in the Table above.

These people receive a CD and literature packet costing us $10 for the cost of the CD, literature and postage. This means an additional $5,230 cost to be included in the campaign. So far the campaign cost us $5,000 for 25,000 mailings, or $0.20 each mailing, and $10.00 for each response. That makes the grand total for the cost of the campaign $15,230.

Once we get these responses I have three more promotional mailings planned, about 500 responders each mailing. Since the quantity is so much smaller than the original mailing I plan to print those mailing pieces in-house on our color Lexmark printer and send them first class mail.

The letters and flyers for these three follow-up mailings are already designed and can be printed at a moment's notice. I have in place an automatic system, in our Master/Entry program, that provides us with a mail merge list of each responder within the scheduled number of days for the three separate mailings.

In the past we could count on the 2% response rate, or 500 records, giving us, within a few years, a mix of customers at different levels of individual total purchases, but an estimated total for all that purchase anything at all, of

If my predictions are correct we achieve a rate of return of $400,000 in sales within several years for the investment of $15,230 for the total cost of the marketing campaign. That is a rate of return on investment of more than 2,500%.

The "frosting-on-the-cake" is that we expect 10% of our repeat customers (seen as 47 people) will be happy enough to give us a testimonial, or refer is names of five persons.

As the months and years roll by, we gather statistics related to each of the "products" described above ("response," "buyer," "repeat customer," "testimonial") those statistics are collected customer by customer so that at any time we can add up all customers who originally entered our list of names on XXX represent the following results:

List 13

Mailed over five weeks starting on 05/01/07

Quantity: 25,000

Type: Postcard A13 (code reference)

Response rate: 2.21% (527 persons)

About 2% of these responses will be 10 persons who purchase $60 each, or total of $600. This would be our normal expectation if we did not do the follow-up mailings. However, I have three already-designed follow-up mailings scheduled to be sent out at two week intervals after we first get a response.

I predict that these three follow-up messages will increase our number of initial customers to 8% rather than the 2%. That means we will get 40 persons in this category instead of 10 and that the purchases by these additional people will generate $2,400 in sales. Boosting the number of these initial customers will cause a larger number to of our total number of responders who become repeat buyers, and go on to become big customers.

About 4% of these responses will be 20 persons who purchase about $240 each, or $4,800 total. Initially the 20 persons would have been as shown, but with those extra follow-ups, the 20 people should become 60 and I predict that we will capture all 60 of them to purchase $240 each, or an additional $9,600.

That is a total of $14,400 from this level.

About 1% of these responses, or 5 people, will purchase about $700 each, average, or $3,500 total. The follow up calls both to responders and small customers will carry forward so that the 1% rate, above, will apply to the responder number at a 2% rate rather than the 1% rate shown above. That means that there will be 10 people rather than 5 who achieve the $700 individual rate, or an extra $3,500.

Another 1% of these responses will be about 5 more people who purchase about $2,000 each, average, or about $10,000 total.

Again the follow-up mailings will increase this 1% rate to 2% and give us a total of 10 people who reach the accumulated purchase rate of $2,000 each, or $20,000.

About 0.2% of these responses will be about 1 person who, on past history, will buy about $10,000 total.

I predict that we will get 3 persons, not just 1, from this group of responders who will accumulate $10,000 in purchases, each from the wise use of follow-up promotions.

The sum of these predictions is well above $60,000. The return on the investment of $15,000 is about 400% over a three year period.

Eventually no marketing campaign should be suggested to Management that does not have all the above predictive information, backed up with whatever past statistics we have. We will not have those statistics at first, but we should be sure we are gathering all the statistics that would provide all this information eventually.

Other types of marketing campaigns, such as a Google Ad Words campaign, should have similar data for prediction and results. We can have many marketing campaigns to collect identities, or to promote actual sales of specific products. Each of these different campaigns must have its own set of prediction factors and appropriate results statistics being gathered on a regular basis.

Those who contact us typically provide a mailing address and that list is then our list for printed promotional messages, not relying solely on purchased lists of names

We must not depend only on those web pages for getting either "new names" or for selling products, but use the web pages well as part of the total marketing strategy.

THE SIZE NOT THE QUALITY OF AN ORG'S MAILING LIST AND THE NUMBER OF MAILINGS AND LETTERS TO IT DETERMINE THE GROSS INCOME OF AN ORG. IF THIS IS NOT KNOWN AS A SENIOR DATUM TO EXEC SECS [Exec Council] AND KEPT BY THEM, THEIR CONDITION IS TREASON. Page 486 OEC Vol 0, Gross Income, Senior Datum, HCO PL 30 July 1968.

After decades of non-use of our mailing list in our new era we started to ready the list for use. Of the 88,000 names on the old list, 11,000 of them had spent some $5,500,000 ($500 each, a fantastic record for any retail sales organization) with us while the remainder had no purchases. This is often the case that you work hard, in Div 6, to gather new names, or you purchase names and send some nice promo to them, but the large bulk of sales always comes from a small percentage of our list of names.

Of these 10,000 names there were about 1,500 with foreign addresses and who bought some $1,500,000 from us. When we discarded the very old names with suspect addresses, we finally came up with about 60,000 names to send to the Post Office for address verification. When these are returned we will be able to select the buyers on that list and send out Div 2 bulk mail. We will also be able to select the non-buyers on the list and Div 6 will send out bulk mail to get them to buy something and then start getting the Div 2 materials.

We can't use "US Post Office bulk mail for foreign addresses, but our foreign customers are sufficiently numerous and affluent that we need to figure special mass mailings to them.

These are the actions of marketing.

As I drafted the first version of this Company Policy I asked for research into what types of marketing and promotion were being done by others who also subscribe to the same type of business management as does Vibrant Life. I found that there were some suggested rules that, upon inspection, did not seem to apply to the vitamin business or our type of business. Therefore I have looked carefully back through our long history to see what were the successful actions and offer my advice now based on that inspection.

The most basic of fundamental truth about how we should market and promote our products comes from a lecture by Mr. L. Ron Hubbard. The lecture is in a series entitled "The Factors, Admiration and the Renaissance of Beingness," more specifically from lecture #7 in that series:

"Money flows toward points which attract prosurival attention. All you've got to do is stand up there and keep on being prosurvival, and be prosurvival in a widening communicating sphere and you will just have to start throwing this stuff away! ...

...

You make money as much as you get attention and you get as much attention in a society, as far as you put your communication lines out. And if you don't put your communication points out in a society, there isn't any flow-in in terms of money. (Quote from lecture, copyrighted by the L. Ron Hubbard Library, All Rights Reserved)

It is not automatically simple to figure out what society thinks is prosurvival when they consume vast quantities of Coke Cola, street drugs, cigarettes and bad food. Fortunately there is a system, described within the Hubbard Management System for creating interest in people and finding out what people think is ruining their lives -- in other words the stuff that is NOT prosurvival for them and, thus, the stuff which IS prosurvival for them. The Hubbard system for this is well described, in considerable detail, HERE, and must be studied as part of this Company Policy on marketing. The linked reference is entitled "How to Create Interest In Others" and per the Hubbard Management System the Division 2 is called the Disseminating Division and its job is well described in a series of articles by Mr. Hubbard, called the "Marketing Series."

The most vital form of marketing is books and we consider our 100,000 web pages as "books."

Almost all of our customers and our prospects arise from people who have tried our products and/or read amongst our 100,000 web pages or heard personally from someone who has done one of these two things. That is called word-of-mouth marketing and it is the finest type of marketing. Our marketing approach must be to get people to read these pages and encourage them to talk to others about the information on these pages.

Mr. Hubbard has this to say about "word of mouth."

The keynote in any promotion is word of mouth.

You can talk all you want about paid ads and radio ads and every other kind of ad but sooner or later a property gets into word of mouth or it doesn't. In other words people start telling each other about it.

That happens to be the senior publicity on any item. Something people do not talk about can be advertised and publicized until you are black in the face and it won't sell.

HCOPL 31 December 2000, Word Of Mouth, page 185, Mgt. Series 3, Page 183.

Even though we sell more oral chelation product than all else combined, a stray page on a different subject can so appeal to someone that he tells others about his reading experience and goes on to read other pages leading to learning about heart disease and oral chelation.

Even so, the concept of "oral chelation" is not well known in society and the medical community, health insurance and massive drug interests are inundating society with billions of dollars in marketing on harmful and false health technology.

Every name in our mailing list SHOULD BE regarded as pure gold in value to us -- but only if some pro-survival offer or item is sent to that person on a regular basis.

"Regular?" When material is sent through the Post Office by bulk mail the Post Office requires a certificate that each name has been verified as to accuracy through a Post Office-sponsored service, such as shown below. Additionally, the Hubbard Management System calls for at least two mailings each year to the entire mailing list of customers. The more often a mailing list is "mailed to" the more valuable is that list. Each name, per old data, is worth a minimum of $10.00 making our present file "worth" $220,000 (but not if we fail to mail to the list regularly and fail to keep address changes current in the list).

A mailing list does not lose value with age, but only with neglect. A mailing list ONLY of our own customers is also NOT sufficient. We need to purchase mailing lists in addition to using our own mailing list.

Orgs in the past spent their promo money only on BMO (bulk mail out) -- which is to say, only on the Scn field they already had sold.

To expand, an org must continually reach not only old and on-lines public but especially new public. It is upon this that future expansion depends.

(Pg 501, OEC Vol 0, HCOPL 27 July 1982RA Deputy FBOs For Marketing Of Org Resources For Exchange (D/FBO For More)

Per Hubbard Management System, at least two mailings per year (Per HCOPL 7 December 1966RA, Pg 214, OEC Vol. 2 covering a "mailing list" of people who have purchased something. Not everyone on our 88,000 name list is a buyer.)

Address Correction / Verification

There are many online services that allow you to find out a ZIP code / postal code for an address, or even validate and automatically correct misspelled addresses, or addresses with missing elements. The free online solutions offered are good for single address corrections; many of the companies also offer paid services for batch address correction / verification.

USA, EU, Canada Uniserv
Powerful address correction and verification for many European countries, US and Canada.

USA The National Address Server
Corrects and completes misspelled or incomplete addresses, adds ZIP+4 code (January 2002 database).

USA USPS Address Verification Resources
This page contains a collection of links to various sites and companies, that provide address verification services.

USA Address Lookup
Free U.S. address verification.

Canada Canadian Address Lookup
Corrects and completes Canadian addresses, postcodes.

This Company Policy introduces the term "Bulk Mail Out," and differentiates that term from another, similar, that has been actively in use for some years, "Originated Letters Out."

"Originated Letters Out" is now defined as those first class postage letters sent out by our present Div. 4 (click here for the history of why we have used Div 4 for "marketing" , within their own resources of mailing list names and staff. These letters re "mail merged" form letters customized with the person's personal name and address, sent by first class mail.

We will soon start doing "Div 6 Bulk Mail campaigns" using whatever staff we have.

The term "Bulk Mail Out" as used in the Hubbard Management System, did not involve "personalized letters" but rather consisted of typical magazines and booklets where there might be a mailing label stuck on the envelop, sending a non-personalized message.

Normally bulk mail means printed pieces sent through the US Post Office. Our electronic news letters and teasers are too important to NOT count them so they should be counted as "bulk electronic letters out" and each of them should include the feature we know of as a "tracking counter on some link on that message. We are sending out about 15,000 of these every time and they go out about twice per week. Each edition has been getting about a 6% click through == quite good enough to continue that promotion and expand on it as long as the click through rate does not drop below 5% on a regular basis. We are rich with possibilities of what to send and to whom and how.

With current electronic and computer capabilities a "bulk mailing" can be and should be highly customized to include the person's personal information.

There is an important question as to what "subject" a bulk mailing should cover. One excellent method of deciding on a subject is to find out what products are being sold or what subjects are covered on the web pages that come up in the regular statistics of most popular pages. One "obscure" web page descries "floaters and sinkers" and refers to the condition of bowel movements. It is not necessary to understand WHY so many people are interested in that subject and read that page, it is of use to us to know that this subject, with clever text, may be a good one for a bulk mail project (selling oral chelation which contributes to good digestion and healthy bowel movements.

Bulk Mail Out may often be very similar in appearance to the "Originated Letters Out" which we have been sending out for years. Most of these "originated letters out" recently have been a customized and personalized form letter with a flier sent first class mail in a window envelop.

Originated Letters Out have always been actually mailed out and there should never be a cycle of action involving Originated Letters Out that does not include stuffing, stamping and delivery to the post office. There can be different but flawed thinking that suggests a bulk mail campaign is "good" when the piece is planned and printed, but sitting in a pile somewhere waiting for the mailing to be done.

Our distinction between these two terms will be somewhat arbitrary.

Originated Letters Out will continue to be those mail-merge letters sent out within the resources of Div 4, taking advantage of the mailing list and often using marketing materials created and printed in Div 2. Traditionally these were always sent by first class postage. When this same resource is used (as in an all-hands) to send out an "otherwise" bulk mailing by Div 2, the mailing handled in this way has been sent by first class postage and thus not technically "bulk mail."

These letters were typically created during a week when the stats for VSD were low and we needed some immediate promotional activity. Div 4 will continue to have its own weekly targets to send out these letters and will plan on what to send and to whom.

Div 2 will be responsible for creating and handling the sending of "Bulk Mail Out" with the initial target of about 5,000 pieces sent out each time, with a once-monthly target. When possible these will be created in Div 2, printed at some outside printer and delivered to our mailing house to use the bulk mail service of the US Postal Service. Div 2 would also be responsible for acquiring the list of names (either purchased or some selection of our own names) and also keeping track of the responses (until that response can be recorded within the new electronic management system being created.

The "quality" of our promotional pieces can be measured by this LRH datum:

THE FORMAT, LAYOUT, TYPEFACES (STYLES AND SIZE OF TYPE), PAPER AND COLOR ARE THEMSELVES A MESSAGE INDEPENDENT OF THE MEANING OF THE WORDS OR PICTURE CONTENT AND MUST THEMSELVES COMMUNICATE THE MOOD AND THE INTENDED MESSAGE TO BE AN EFFECTIVE FINAL DESEMINATION PRODUCT. THEY FORM THE CARRIER WAVE ON WHICH THE WRITTEN OR PICTURED MESSAGE TRAVELS. IT IS THESE THINGS BY WHICH THE REALITY OF THE COMMUNICATION IS JUDGED AND ARE THEMSELVES A SIGNIFICANT PORTION OF THE QUALITY OF THE COMMUNICATION.

Pg 219, Mgt. Series 3, HCOPL 10 April 1977, Dissemination Pieces, Stable Datum, Appearance, Layout and Design.)

This same LRH concept is also shown here where he answers the question, "How good does a piece of professional art have to be?"

We will continue to have a weekly graph of the number of "originated letters out" (sent out by
Div 4) and will now have a new statistic and new weekly graph of "Bulk Mail Out" where the responsibility lies with Div 2, even if there is occasional use of Div 4 staff to help get it out, and even if it is sent by first class mail.

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