MAIL: MAKING THE MOST OF MULTI-CHANNEL Don’t be frightened by cross-media marketing; it could help you grow your business exponentially.
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arketers are looking for ways to connect more meaningfully with customers. These days, they are not interested in doing 200,000 static mailing runs, but they will invest in a print and online campaign that gathers information for their database. They will send out 50,000 or 70,000 highly targeted and personalized pieces, because the response rate goes up when they do. The mailing print community sits at the back end of this process, but it should be helping to handle the front end too. If printers don’t start having these conversations with their customers, they’ll see their print runs continuing to get smaller and smaller. Their revenues will go down unless they move upstream and help provide the online and digital components of the communications program, which are starting to now drive the high-value print component. What mail printers need to be offering their customers is cross-media services. This phrase scares some because it sounds like something new, intangible, and completely outside their comfort zone, but it is definitely worth investigating. And, if you’re already printing variable data mailings, cross-media does not have to be that hard to do. 16
MAY-JUNE 2016 | www.MailingSystemsTechnology.com
What Is Cross-Media Marketing? Cross-media is a form of direct marketing that combines multiple channels such as direct mail, email, SMS (text) messages, websites, mobile apps, and social media. With a consistent look and feel across all channels, cross-media is a powerful tool for companies to engage with their customers. A simple example of cross-media is a standard direct mail piece that includes a personal URL (pURL), which the recipient of the mailer can type into a web browser or click on a QR code to view a personalized landing page. This campaign uses just two channels, print and the web. This example can be deployed for many uses — event registration, surveys, database cleansing, and more. A more sophisticated example would also include using the QR code on the printed mailer to take a recipient directly to a mobile-friendly website, so mobile is a third channel. Using multiple channels increases the reach of the campaign by supporting customers’ preferred means of receiving communications, making it more likely that recipients will respond to a call to action. Cross-media also increases opportunities for engagement by offering different types
BY CHARLOTTE TUECKMANTEL
of media, such as video or interactive 360-degree views of a product, in addition to the static content in a printed mailer. Increased Response Perhaps more importantly, using multiple channels produces significantly better response rates than any one channel can on its own. There is substantial evidence that including a printed piece in a marketing campaign can significantly increase the response rate. According to an Adobe study, companies who introduced a mail component into their campaigns to increase sales leads or new customer acquisition reported a 12% increase in responses over email alone. And the more channels used, the better the response rates become: figures from InfoTrends show that a direct mailer plus a web landing page or email can increase response rates by 27%, while having both the web page and email in addition to the mailer raises them by 37%; adding mobile marketing as well raises the rate by 45%. A UK direct marketing company ran a cross-media campaign to educate its own clients and to raise money for a variety of charities and achieved a 53% response rate.