The Benefits of Marketing Integration (and How to Do It)
Online marketing tactics like websites, pay per click (PPC), email and search engine optimization are necessary for many business models. There can be no debate as to the importance of online marketing in this day and age. Yet in this technological climate it is easy to forget that traditional offline marketing avenues are still effective and can working alongside online initiatives.
In fact, customers who receive a printed catalog spend more meaningful time on the company's website and purchase 28 percent more on average than customers who did not receive a catalog, according to recent Deliver Magazine research. And that held for every age category.
What is the takeaway? Integrating your online and offline marketing is crucial to your marketing success.
Businesses that grasp this truth are positioned to reap a much higher return on investment from their marketing campaigns, which, over time, puts them head and shoulders above their competition in the marketplace, both in revenue and the minds of consumers.
Let's look into why this is the case.
The Benefits of Marketing Integration
Here are two major benefits you get from integrated marketing that you don't get from a solely Web-based effort.
1. Targeting your ideal customer
The direct mail mailing list is still the most effective way to put your message in front of a large audience of ideal buyers. You can compile a mailing list based on a model of your current best customers. You can filter results by age, gender, income level and many more critical demographics. By integrating, you can reach the actively searching crowd (with PPC) and the yet-to-search crowd (with direct mail).
2. More prospects reading your message
As great as online marketing strategies are, both email and online ads get opened at much lower rates than direct mail postcards. A direct mail postcard, even if it makes its way into the trash, still delivers its headline to the audience. And, the more consistently you mail, the more likely you are to increase awareness of your business.
How to Integrate Offline and Online
Here are three examples of how postcards and online marketing can work together to help you build your business.
1. Mail postcards that point to a landing page
There is no better way to communicate to prospects exactly what you want to communicate than sending them to a well-designed landing page. It makes your message (offer, special, etc.) the center of attention, unlike a homepage where there are many distractions that can interrupt the communication process. Use landing pages to guide prospects through the sales cycle. Don't leave them to their own devices.
2. Follow Up with Google Remarketing
Once you drive prospects to a landing page or your website, be sure to follow up with them. Not every lead closes on the first contact. The best way to do this online is with a product from Google called remarketing. It allows your ads to appear to prospects all around the Internet after they leave your site. Once they navigate away, your ad automatically triggers and shows up anywhere they go on the Google marketing network, which includes thousands of sites (including big names like dictionary.com and CNN.com).
3. Use postcards to collect email addresses
Email is an extremely affordable way to stay in front of customers and prospects alike. The combination of email and Google Remarketing creates fantastic exposure for your business and increases your close percentage. By driving more traffic to your website with postcards, you can increase the number of form submissions you receive on your site. More submissions means a bigger email list, which means more warm leads and more sales.
Online marketing simply can't compete with direct mail in terms of targeting a specific audience and gaining mass exposure, and direct mail doesn't offer the cost-efficiency that online platforms do for following up with prospects. Integrate their strengths to increase the efficiency of your marketing system - and help you get the most out of your budget.
Joy Gendusa is the Founder and CEO of PostcardMania, a fully-integrated marketing firm specializing in direct mail. She used postcards to grow PostcardMania from just a phone and computer to a $22million enterprise in less than a decade. Connect with Joy on Google+.
