FMCG + CRM = ???

I don't know much about CRM. The little I know is that a big customer database is the ultimate pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the practitioners are dying to get hold of my personal details, and sometimes, I get personalised messages, mostly in print form and lately, digital.

What I'm working on right now is on developing a printed direct mailer for an FMCG brand.

So, here's where I'm not sure whether it'll work.

Most FMCG products we know don't cost that much. Rare are those that cost more than RM 100. And the sure thing about direct mailers is that :

1) One fancy pack can be expensive - the full color printing, the special paper, the postage

2) The response rate is notoriously low, a good average is somewhere between 5-10% and that's from a database of people who actually want to receive messages from you.

So, it begs the question, Why do it when the odds don't look good?

Some would argue that there's need to keep the conversation going. Here's a hypothetical. Let's say, Brand X is the best performing beauty brand in its category. It has a sizeable database, although about less than half can be considered as active members. And of this half, about 60% actually want to receive something in the mail from Brand X.

So here's the question. If I were an active member, why would I want to receive information from Brand X in the mail?

Personally, I would if I wanted more information about healthy food for healthy skin, make-up tips or price promos exclusively for members.

Or would I? I've just described what would typically go into a direct mailer specifically for a beauty product.

Let's take a different route. What would anyone want to receive in the mail these days?

In this day and age, it seems as if we get bad news a lot from the mail (also known as bills), some subscription stuff like magazines, birthday cards from old relatives (this too is becoming rare), maybe the oddly quaint handwritten letter (I haven't gotten one in years).

But strangely enough, I do look forward to getting that IKEA catalog every year. A cheque is even more welcomed. I do get vouchers sometimes but most of the time they are hardly worth the effort to use.

The thing is would I look forward to receiving a direct mailer which is a newsletter about beauty topics from Brand X? Would it really make Brand X more endearing to me?

Try as I might to wrap my head around it, I just don't see how this form of CRM is worth the money spent on it when it seems that it'll be a whole lot of wastage.