Integrating Direct and Online Marketing for Bigger Bang

Marketing

Integrating Direct and Online Marketing for Bigger Bang
by Beth Wampler



"Integrated Marketing" is all the rage these days, and for good reason. Anything you can do to leverage your marketing message…to make your brand and your key selling points more memorable to your target audience…to stretch your precious marketing dollars-is a worthy strategy. Andintegrated marketing, when done well, gives you all of these benefits.

You could write a very lengthy book on integrated marketing (and many people have, check out "The Customer Century: Lessons from World Class Companies in Integrated Communications"  Routledge Corporate Communication Series, by Anders Gronstedt). This white paper will focus on one specificissue: integrating the new online media into the old marketing standby, direct mail. If you're using direct mail-whether catalogs, post cards, letters, collateral or self-mailers-and you're not incorporating online campaign extensions into every piece, you're missing one of the greatest response boosters available. Adding online componentsgives your customers or prospects (and you) the benefit of immediate gratification. And it puts them in charge of how much and when they want to "drill down" for additional information.

There are many ways to easily build new media elements into your current direct marketing campaigns. Here are five innovative ways to get your prospects more involved and in a deeper relationship with your brand:

In your direct marketing pieces, promote your corporate URL and drive prospects to your web site where they can sign up for a free offer, such as a newsletter subscription or white paper. (This way you alsocapture valuable information about them so you can begin a dialogue.)

Use a micro-site as a landing pad for coordinating with your campaign theme, where prospects can get more detailed campaign-specific information or view a virtual product demo that you don't necessarily wantpermanently housed on your web site.

Create an online contest or survey that can only be entered with a personalized password.

Post product specs and other specialized information that is too user-specific to include in a more general-audience marketing piece. For example, if you're mailing to CEOs and focusing on top-level benefits,include a URL with IT-related specs for their  IT folks, or let them know the URL where security issues are addressed.

Create a "user's group" online and maintain regular contact with potential buyers.

Let's look at a few of these ideas in more detail.

Drive traffic to your site with a free offer-and get valuable information.

One of the first imperatives of direct marketing is to establish and then develop a one-on-one relationship with your prospects. The idea is that the more you know about them, and the more familiar they are with you and your product, the closer you are to a sale.

One thing online media can do very inexpensively is capture information. Offer your prospects a newsletter or a white paper and direct them to the web site to sign up for this free offer. Once there, with a simple CGI script you can capture some key information about them. Most people are willing togive up a limited amount of information in order to qualify for something they deem to have value.

Important! Be sure and post a privacy policy that lets visitors know exactly how this information with be used, if it will be shared, and if so, with whom and under what circumstances. Even if you don't plan to share information with any other companies, let them know how you plan to communicate withthem further.

Not only will you be establishing a relationship with your prospects and providing value, you will be building a database that can be built into all your future marketing efforts.

Use a micro-site for maximum campaign impact.

You don't want to completely overhaul your web site every time you launch a new marketing campaign. But you do want some consistency between the look prospects see in your campaign materials, and what they find when they go visit you online. How can you have both? With a micro-site. A micro-site is amini web site that typically has a short life span (several weeks to several months) and a limited number of pages.

You might think of a micro-site as an interim landing pad that provides the connection between the direct mail campaign and the corporate web site. A B2B technology company used a micro-site to carry the design and theme of its current marketing campaign online. Once at the micro-site, visitors couldanswer a quick series of questions and be given a brief security analysis. They could then choose from several options to get more information by clicking on links that took them into the corporate web site. It was a seamless transition for the prospect and enabled the company to quickly coordinate their offline and online look without majorchanges to their primary web site.

Another benefit to micro-sites is that you can precisely measure response to your marketing campaign by tracking who hits the micro-site, where they've come from, and how many of them go on to the corporate site for more details. You can even designate distinct URLs for mailing to different segments ofyour list and test response rates for each segment.

Personalized password-only entry boosts response.

For decades, we've known that personalizing direct mail helps boost response. It's no surprise the same applies to online marketing. If you can offer a personalized web experience, you can dramatically improve the effectiveness of  your direct mail effort. Here's how: offer a personalized passwordor code on each direct mail piece. The password can be used online to enter a contest, complete a survey or qualify for free samples or other premium offer. Most people can't resist checking to see what their very own personal code will get them. One company saw response rates go from 3% using traditional direct mail response mechanisms to20% using a personalized password response mechanism. That's a 666% increase in response rate!

Summary

Why integrate offline and online marketing? Let me count the reasons.

Incorporating an online component into your offline direct marketing efforts offers several great benefits:

Eliminates the postage cost for business reply cards and/or the labor cost of an inbound telemarketing staff.

Eliminates the cost and potential inaccuracy of manually entering prospect data.

Builds your database and captures key information, enhancing your knowledge about potential customers.

Establishes online communication as an option between you and your prospect.

Enables quantitative tracking of response to each and every marketing effort.

Allows prospects to be in control of the purchase relationship. In an online environment, prospects can spend as much or as little time as they wish going over product features and benefits; they can drill downfor additional information based on their own needs and desires. If they aren't ready to buy right now, they can bookmark the site or print out specific pages with information they deem valuable. In short, giving them an online option (assuming your website is a good one that's simple and intuitive to navigate with good content) empowersyour prospects and that's a great way to build a better relationship.


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Beth A. Wampler, Creative Director, AOR, Inc. (www.thinkaor.com), an integrated marketing, advertising and design firm.