What do I choose: Online or Offline Marketing?

Are you feeling a little overwhelmed about what to do as a result of the amount of options there seem to be when it comes to direct marketing techniques and opportunities?

How do you choose between online or offline?

Well let’s try help make your decision a little easier by starting off with, why choose between Offline and Online when you can combine them to make a very powerful marketing combination. With Cross Media Marketing you can take advantage of both online and offline marketing tools to build unique and dynamic marketing campaigns that engage, retain and interact with your prospects and clients.

Cross Media Marketing has and is proving to be one of the best ways to not only get a response from your prospects and or clients, but to achieve an overall much higher response from majority of DM (Direct Marketing) campaigns. It can include 2 or more tools including email, print, Landing Pages, pURLS (personalised landing pages) and QR Codes from your marketing tool box to be used in your next DM or Customer Loyalty Campaign

Cross Media (CM) Marketing connects the power of offline marketing tools like print ads, business cards and direct mail with the interactive capabilities of your online tools i.e. your website, Facebook page and even your YouTube channel.

Why do this? CM Campaigns are proven to deliver higher conversion rates of direct mail and email recipients into more qualified, better educated prospects and then ultimately valued customers.

Here are some ideas for some simple types of basic Cross Media implementation:

• QR code on your Business Card directing them to a landing page, Facebook Page or a YouTube video
• Direct Mail Postcard and/ or Email, with a specific landing page on it for what you have to offer, taking them offline to online
• Print, Television, Radio or Online Banner Ads directing them to a specific landing page on your website

Want to supercharge your campaign? Well, if you have a database of prospects and or clients you can with personalisation, turning your marketing campaign into a 1 to 1 Personalised Marketing Campaign. If you only have names and addresses, well you can create some pretty eye catching images with their name in it that will help grab your intended recipients’ attention.

Then depending on the information you have in your database, for example if you have more than just a name and address and have details like gender and date of birth you can increase the relevancy of your campaign material by personalising the combination of visuals (i.e. matching imagery and colour schemes to better appeal to the gender and generation of the recipient) and messages (i.e. matching your copy to demographic) too.

Just some ways you can go much further:

• you can change the type (font) and presentation style according to the age group to better appeal
• promote a specific product based on their age and gender
• up-sell or cross-sell a specific product based on each customers past purchases
• display individual special and unique offers to each customer or prospect and test what gets a better response
• create links to personalised landing pages taking them offline to online and keep the unique experience going
• Postcard or Direct Mail piece with a Variable Map Route specific to the recipient

With the power of 1 to 1 Personalised Marketing campaigns the possibilities of what you can do are practically limitless.

If you like the sound of implementing personalised campaigns but don’t have a database with even names and address, here are a few examples for collecting data:

• Start collecting them when they purchase, I know it takes a little more time, but it is well worth it to create a database
• Offer your prospect or customer a free sample, discounted or value add offer in return for some basic contact details
• Create a landing page with a sign up form for great deals or special offers
• Send a questionnaire or survey with the chance to win something as a result of participating.

So this all sounds great, but we are told these days and rightfully so, with any marketing initiative we implement whilst we all want the overall end result to be more sales and or increased customer loyalty right off the bat, there is no silver bullet in marketing. Cross Media and Personalised Marketing campaigns do enable you to track and measure results and include areas like:

• Initial response and levels of engagement
• Cross media tracking
• Overall conversion percentages and results

There are many more factors and opportunities to consider when developing and implementing successful campaigns. So we need the capability of tracking and reporting as they are extremely important in providing you with vital information on which stage/s (Email, Postcard, Landing Page or pURL) produced or may not have produced the desired results of the campaign, and further which combination of things like headlines, offers, imagery, copy and overall creative is returning you the best overall results especially when we are split testing. With this information you can then either tweak and fine tune the next campaign which is hopefully the case or worst case scenario go back to the drawing board, but you will have captured some great data on what has and hasn’t worked.

Overall there are many benefits to bridging and combining offline and online in your next marketing initiative and implementing a Cross / Personalised Marketing Campaign. In summary outcomes you can expect:

• trackable, measurable results and much higher response rates
• engage your prospects and or clients in more meaningful and relevant dialogue leading to increased customer loyalty
• better qualified and warm sales leads to help generate more sales and
• create or regenerate your database

which overall all adds up to creating a better ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment), or as we like to say “much more bang for your buck”.

Don’t miss an opportunity to promote your business just because time is short!

Cheers

Tom Dickson.