Integrated Marketing: How To Successfully Combine Online And Offline Marketing Channels
Are you worried about your email campaigns not performing up to the mark?
A typical customer receives tens and hundreds of marketing emails every week. It is easy for your marketing email to get lost in the plethora of marketing emails the customer receives every day. What if we told you that there is a better, more innovative way to ensure the success of your marketing campaigns?
Integrated direct mail campaigns incorporate different marketing or communication channels to enhance the impact of your marketing message. Here, we discuss everything you need to know about integrated direct mail campaigns and how they can benefit your business.
We will also look at how you can integrate your direct mail and email marketing efforts. The article also discusses the scope of multichannel marketing. Additionally, we will explain why using a direct mail automation tool is essential for all multichannel or integrated campaigns.
What is an Integrated Direct Mail Campaign?
An integrated direct mail campaign is a marketing strategy that integrates multiple channels to your direct mail marketing campaign to communicate effectively with the target audience. In other words, you can pitch the same or similar marketing message to your target audience across different channels.
It enables you to plan your marketing message deep into the audience’s mind and generate better results for your marketing campaigns. There are several advantages of combining or integrating different communication channels for your marketing campaign.
As we know, direct mail marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels that offers an excellent open and response rate. Including direct mail in other marketing campaigns makes it stand out from the over-familiar digital marketing campaigns.
5 Reasons For Employing Integrated Direct Mail
The primary reason for integrating direct mail campaigns into your digital marketing is simple. It has become increasingly challenging to capture the customer or prospect’s attention via digital channels. Direct mail marketing enables marketers and business owners to reach their high-priority customers and prospects effectively.
But, that is only part of the story. Many marketers and business owners have realised the potential for direct mail marketing in today’s environment. However, only a few have realised the potential of fully integrating direct mail into their digital marketing efforts.
Here are 5 of the most significant advantages of integrated direct marketing that other marketers don’t want you to know about.
#1 The Halo Effect
With integrated marketing communication, you can effectively integrate the marketing message across all marketing channels you use. Say that you use direct mail, email, digital ads, and social media as marketing channels.
Using an integrated marketing approach, you can time your marketing message to reach the audience simultaneously via different channels. Such an action creates the “Halo” effect, making the whole combination more remarkable than the sum of individual parts.
It essentially means that your marketing message creates a more significant impact on the audience than a regular marketing campaign. Furthermore, direct mail plays a substantial part in making your marketing message memorable. It is possibly the most impactful marketing channel for conveying the message.
#2 Increases Direct Mail ‘Cut-Through’
As we have already mentioned, direct mail’s cut-through rate is significantly higher than any digital marketing channel. More people are eager to open a direct mail and check out its content than a digital channel such as Email.
As a result, it helps you promote awareness or boost brand recognition of online organisations. Hence, you can drive more traffic to your website or social media pages. So, it effectively increases your website’s SEO ranking on the digital marketing side.
In other words, you can use direct mail communications to improve the visibility and traffic of your online assets.
#3 Move Valuable Responders Online
An integrated marketing strategy connects online and offline marketing channels and allows the user to move from one medium to another. Although direct mail offers several advantages to its customers, ‘ cost to touch’ is not one of them.
Direct mail campaigns are often more expensive than online marketing channels because of their requirements. Furthermore, snail mail is not a convenient communication channel as it can take days to talk to someone via mail.
You can use direct mail to lead the customers and prospects to a desired online channel, including your website and social media page. Hence, direct mail acts as a gate-opener to facilitate low-cost and convenient conversation between you and your customers.
#4 Personalised Direct Mail Messages That Align With The Online Experience
With online marketing capabilities, you can easily segment audience data. Marketers and business owners can use this segmented data for creating personalised direct mail messages that align perfectly with the online experience.
What does it mean for your marketing-integrated direct mail campaign?
It means that you can create more impactful marketing messages. More importantly, it means that the marketing message that you wish to convey continues to reach the audience beyond direct mail. The same message and offer are reflected on the online channels.
However, such details are dependent on the marketer or business owner who executes the integrated marketing campaign. If you can get it right, it will enable you to minimise the possibility of buying dropouts.
#5 Hyper-Personalised Direct Mail
You can go a step further in integrated marketing by employing hyper-personalised direct mail. As the name suggests, hyper-personalised direct mail involves creating a one-on-one and consistent customer journey.
Also, hyper-personalisation needs to apply to offline and online channels in integrated marketing communication. It can sometimes be tricky, especially if you don’t have post data on the customer.
It is an approach that works best for your past customers or retargeting campaigns. You can base your marketing campaign on the previous buying behaviour and pitch an offer that’s relevant to them. You can even use a PURL in the mailer to pique the customer’s curiosity and make them take action.
Integrating Direct Mail And Email Campaigns
One of the most convenient ways of implementing an integrated direct marketing campaign is to integrate your direct mail and email campaigns. The majority of marketers are well familiar with both marketing channels, making combining the two relatively easy.
By combining direct mail and email campaigns, you can effectively optimise your marketing efforts and get better results than independently using either of the channels. It means getting a higher response rate and meeting your marketing goals more effectively.
Direct Mail vs Email
Both direct mail and email are two very different marketing channels. Both have their own set of benefits and challenges. You can achieve success for your marketing campaigns using either of the marketing channels. However, both channels do not have the same features as a marketing channel.
Email Marketing
On the one hand, an email campaign is relatively easy to set up, and they provide some great insights such as open rates and the number of clicks. But, on the other hand, the marketing noise level of email marketing has already reached its peak.
In other words, the customer’s inbox is blowing up with unopened marketing emails from EVERYONE. As a result, the open rate of email marketing campaigns has generally come down. Hence, it is no longer viable to use Email as your sole marketing channel. The risk of losing consumers to competitors is high.
Direct Mail Marketing
Direct mail marketing is not as mainstream as Email marketing. Not many marketers or business owners have stopped using it. Furthermore, people generally like receiving direct mail and opening its content. As a result, direct mail always tends to have a higher open and response rate than Email.
According to Fundera, “the direct mail open rates can reach up to 90%”. However, the challenge with implementing direct mail campaigns is much more significant than email marketing. Companies used to have to manually print and write/print letters and then deliver them to the target audience.
Today, advanced direct mail solutions like PostGrid are available that let you automate the entire direct mail process. Direct mail still needs more time to execute Email campaigns as it involves printing and delivering the mailer via postal service.
How to Integrate Direct Mail and Email Marketing Channels?
Integrating direct mail and email marketing channels is one of the basic forms of integrated direct marketing. Because of its simple integration, it is an easy way to understand the concept of integrated marketing. Therefore, learning how to integrate direct mail and email marketing channels will help you use the strategy in more complex situations.
The new and advanced direct mail automation tools enable you to integrate the direct mail system with CRM and other marketing tools. Thanks to direct mail automation tools like PostGrid, marketers can easily create personalised and targeted direct mail campaigns.
It enables you to send direct mail to the target audience on every significant part of the customer journey. For example, you can send a direct mail for pitching a new offer or product your company is launching. Later you could send a thank you note to customers that brought what you were selling.
Here are some ways to integrate direct mail and email marketing channels for your business.
Target Your Non-Responders
Sometimes, you create a near-perfect or perhaps even perfect Email marketing campaign for your business. You have an exciting new offer, an innovative new Email message, and just about everything you need. Yet, the campaign will still have some non-responders.
There are several possibilities why the audience didn’t respond to your message. They may have lost your Email in the marketing emails cluster they receive every day. You may also have caught the customer at the wrong time, and they did not feel like responding then.
In this case, an integrated direct mail campaign can do wonders for your business. Create a list of non-responders to your email campaigns. Then, create a highly-personalised direct mail piece for the target audience and send them the mailer. Such campaigns yield excellent results for business and connect with the audience that you would have otherwise lost.
Create Efficient Follow Up Campaigns
Acquiring new customers via Email marketing is not easy, and it gets more and more difficult as time passes by. Furthermore, the constraints of GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation makes it even more difficult to target new customers via Email.
Nonetheless, acquisition marketing can benefit businesses, especially start-up companies. It is also ideal for momentarily boosting your revenue. You can bypass the challenges of GDPR to some extent by integrating direct mail communications.
Direct mail ads are not as tightly wound as Email marketing regarding GDPR. It means that you can use direct mail for the initial outreach mail and then direct the reader to a landing page. Once they reach your landing page, you can categorise the relevant audience and follow up with Email campaigns.
Use Direct Mail as a Basket/Cart Reminder
As a customer, we are all well-familiar with basket or cart reminders. Every time we add a product on an eCommerce site and do not complete the checkout process, we get reminder emails about it. However, these basket reminder emails often go ignored or worse. They go to the spam folder.
Such a situation could lead eCommerce businesses to a substantial loss of revenue. Integrated direct mail can offer a solution to this problem. Direct mail automation solutions like PostGrid enable Ecommerce companies to automatically send basket or cart reminder letters via post.
As we know, the chances of the customer opening the direct mail are significantly higher than any other marketing channel. Hence, if the customer is genuinely interested in the product, they will likely complete the purchase. Furthermore, sending direct mail as a basket reminder will also help your company stand out and establish itself as a brand.
You might also find our blog “Triggered Direct Mail Marketing” helpful if you are interested in trigger-based automatic direct mail marketing.
Event Marketing
Conducting events are a great way to attract new customers and engage with the existing ones. Numerous companies attend networking events and trade shows every year. Such trade shows are highly beneficial to the event organiser. They can collect relevant information on the attendees and create priceless and appropriate mailing lists.
The success of such an event is very much dependent on how significant a reach you have in delivering the event invites. With integrated direct mail campaigns, you can use direct mail and email communication channels to maximise the invite reach. Furthermore, a printed event invite looks more professional and excites the event to some extent.
Similarly, companies taking part in the event can use direct mail to customers or prospects that visit their booth. You can even collect the company’s details, such as company name, email address etc. so that you can follow up with them. Hence, using an integrated marketing approach can be a driving factor for event ROI.
You can also consider sending postcards as event invites. Read our blog “Automated Postcard Mailing” on using postcards for marketing campaigns.
Multichannel Marketing Approach
In many ways, integrated direct marketing resembles a multichannel marketing approach. However, a multichannel marketing campaign is usually more complicated than integrated marketing. We merely integrate the new channel or channels to an existing marketing campaign in integrated marketing.
In multichannel marketing campaigns, the whole marketing strategy incorporates several marketing channels. Furthermore, the marketing strategy itself is more complex for multichannel marketing campaigns.
Tips For Multichannel or Integrated Marketing Campaigns
Here are a few tips that can help optimise your multichannel or integrated marketing campaign.
Maintain Consistency
Make sure that your messaging is consistent throughout the marketing campaign regardless of how many channels you use. It is one of the most crucial tips a company needs to use multiple channels for marketing campaigns.
Additionally, you should also try to be more consistent in your branding. Give special attention to finer details such as maintaining a consistent tagline, colour scheme, and even the font you use. In other words, a prospect who has already received the marketing message should immediately recognise your brand from the follow-up.
Stagger Your Communication Points
We never send three consecutive Emails in one go for Email marketing as it runs the risk of looking like spam. The same goes for your advertising mail. You must not send consecutive mail to the customers without adequate intervals in between.
Marketers must learn to stagger their communication points in integrated marketing campaigns. It is the only way the user has enough time to take in all the presented data. For example, if you are targeting new customers, the best place to start would be to introduce your brand.
You may then follow up with your products/services and explain how their life can be better with what you have to sell. So, you need to gradually rope in your customers with regular follow-ups instead of presenting with a lot of complex data.
Use Landing Pages Intelligently
Landing pages are an integral part of almost every digital marketing campaign. However, many may not realise that landing pages are incredibly beneficial to direct marketing. You can lead the customer to a landing page via a QR code printed on your mailer.
It will take the audience to the appropriate page on your website. The strategy has forever been used in Email marketing. It is now a popular choice for direct mail marketing. There are several advantages to connecting a landing page to your integrated direct mail campaign.
You can use it to increase traffic to your website and make your marketing campaign more visually appealing to the target audience. Furthermore, you can use your website analytic tools to access detailed insights about your marketing campaign and customer behaviour.
Conclusion
Implementing an integrated marketing campaign is not easy. A lot of planning and hard work is necessary to incorporate multiple communication channels for a single integrated marketing campaign. And in many ways, an integrated marketing campaign is similar to multichannel marketing campaigns.
Multichannel marketing campaigns can be even more complex as they usually include more communication channels. However, using advanced marketing tools like PostGrid can significantly make your life easy.
PostGrid’s automated direct mail tool enables you to execute advanced integrated direct mail with minimal errors. You can even integrate PostGrid’s systems into your CRM and personalise your letter. It saves you valuable time and even helps to streamline your direct mail communications.
Ready to Get Started?
Start transforming and automating your offline communications with PostGrid
The post Integrated Direct Mail Campaign appeared first on PostGrid UK.
Via https://www.postgrid.co.uk/integrated-direct-mail-campaign/
source https://postgridunitedkingdom.weebly.com/blog/integrated-direct-mail-campaign9055925
No comments:
Post a Comment