This is Not Your Padre’s Hispanic Market
By Neal Topf

Buenos días from Miami! By the time this issue reaches you, we will all be in full swing preparing for March’s eRetailer Summit held here. Those of us in ERA’s U.S. Hispanic Council look forward to hosting your visit here in one of the most important cities in our segment. We also invite you to join our monthly conference calls in 2009, as we continue to study the challenges and accomplishments of this demographic. If there is one thing that we are certain of, it’s that this is not your padre’s Hispanic market!

What was once a debate among marketers: “Should I or Shouldn’t I be in the Hispanic market?” is now a forgone conclusion. The answer many have given is “Yes, I should,” giving way to the more pragmatic: “How do I reach Hispanics?”

Direct response marketers until recently have always worried about Hispanic consumers’ ability to pay for purchases using credit/debit cards or checks because of the perception that Hispanics prefer to pay only in cash (money orders) or COD. And based on this perception, many marketers strategically ignored Hispanics. Only until the past several years have sheer population growth projections of this segment (thanks, Lou Dobbs), and more importantly, Hispanics’ improved ability to pay for purchases using traditional means, given marketers the impetus to cast their attention once again on our segment.

Some important learning has emerged during the Hispanic Council’s monthly conference call presentations and discussions:

The Direct Marketing Association’s “Reaching the U.S. Hispanic Market” survey offers the following tidbits:

“Credit card ownership and the usage of credit cards as a payment method when shopping from home: 53 percent in 2004 vs. 63 percent in 2006.”

“Lack of trust and privacy concerns remain the most important reasons Hispanics gave for not buying through direct marketing. For Spanish-speaking respondents, the language barrier is a key issue.” Trust among Hispanic direct-response buyers is, however, improving: “On a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 is not a problem and 5 is a very big problem, respondents gave an average score of almost 4 in 2004 to not trusting companies that sell through direct channels. In 2006, this number decreased to 2.75.”

Led by contributions from Salem Radio Networks and Quigley-Simpson, our Council has also analyzed the emergence of multichannel marketing to Hispanics. Among the findings:

Mobile marketing presents a growing opportunity in that 32 percent of all Hispanics are receptive to receiving offers on their phones if they see value in the proposition (CTIA).

Hispanics are similarly more inclined to access news and information via their mobile web browser–at 18 percent, compared with 9.6 percent of all [general market] subscribers (Comscore/mMetrics).

In 2004, only 15 percent of respondents made a purchase from an e-mail offer compared to a vastly larger 68 percent in 2006, according to DMA’s “Reaching the U.S. Hispanic Market.”

While many challenges still face marketers in the quest to attract Hispanics, many positive trends have emerged in DRTV, radio, web, e-mail and mobile marketing. Language preference, geography, level-of-acculturation and country-of-origin profiling will always present important considerations.

Hispanics, nevertheless, have finally followed the larger general market in two ways: Hispanics do increasingly possess the means to pay for their direct response purchases. And, while DRTV and radio strategies are continual works in progress, it’s worth it for marketers to embrace the web, mobile and e-mail in their direct response communications with Hispanics.

Join the ERA U.S. Hispanic Council on the final Friday of every month, as we continue to explore these challenges and more. This is no longer your padre’s Hispanic market!

Neal Topf is the chair of ERA’s U.S. Hispanic Council and is president of Callzilla LLC, a provider of Spanish-language telesales, lead-generation, telemarketing and customer service. He can be reached at ntopf@callzilla.net.