With more and more money being thrown at
digital marketing every year, now is a great time to look at ways to
maximize the impact of your print campaigns and restore balance to your
marketing efforts. Why? Events like Valentines Day in February, Mothers’
Day, taking place in the UK in March and in the US in May, along with
Easter in April, mean that Q1 and Q2 of 2015 are practically crying out
for personalised communication!
Thanks to CRM software, marketers have
swathes of customer data at their fingertips. Using variable printing, a
technique popularised among consumers by Moonpig and Hallmark, to
include a customer’s name or recommended products based on recent
purchases they’ve made is a great way to stand out from all the junk
mail and leaflets that people receive every day.
Direct marketing fell rather out of
fashion for a few years but it’s been enjoying a second wind lately –
marketers are increasingly looking to develop integrated campaigns
spanning both digital and print, and direct marketing fits that bill
quite nicely. The Economist reports that Americans spent a whopping $170 billion on direct marketing in 2012.
There’s no getting around the fact that,
in a world where you can’t leave your laptop for five minutes without
coming back to a spam email, people appreciate it when businesses take
the time to produce something relevant to them that they can hold in
their hand. Studies show that personalised documents improve response
rates by up to 30% and increase customer loyalty by 26% in the short
term and 50% in the long term.
How personal you get is really up to you –
a printed address on the front of a mailshot all the way through to a
personally branded brochure or covering letter – but many businesses err
on the side of caution. There’s always the worry that customers can
find it a little bit off-putting when brands appear to know too much
about them!
We’re now at the stage where there’s
significant overlap between digital and print marketing; QR codes or NFC
tags can be used to allow customers to go straight from your brochure
to your website, while CRM data gathered online will usually provide the
basis for a personalised print campaign. Unique landing pages for
different groups of customers, or even personalised URLs (PURLs) for
every customer, can be fed into Google Analytics to get insight into how
successful a campaign has been.
With 42% of direct mail recipients,
according to a study by Direct Marketing Association, preferring to
respond online, outstanding direct mail campaigns now walk a line
between digital and print marketing. However, to say that direct mail is
just another tool to bring traffic to your website is an
understatement. Done well, a personalised direct mail campaign can make
customers feel like a company understands them and is putting effort
into suggesting products they’ll actually like rather than just shouting
‘SELL SELL SELL!’
What they might not realise is that CRM
tools and the rapid development of litho quality digital printing has
made it easier than ever to run an effective personalised campaign. But
that will just be our secret…!
Source: http://www.creativeguerrillamarketing.com/guerrilla-marketing/increase-response-rates-30-personalised-direct-mail-campaign/
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