Non-Line Blogging

Here are a few thoughts about "Non-Line Marketing" that I pulled together with Chris Combemale, my Co-Founder of The Email Academy... 

As these difficult trading conditions continue many organisations are looking at ways to reduce their direct marketing costs without adversely affecting sales. One quick win has been trying to migrate customers from expensive off-line channels to cheaper on-line ones; speaking to people through email, at about half a pence a message, is a more attractive than saying the same thing through direct mail at maybe fifty pence a message. This cost-differential (email is 100 times cheaper than direct mail) means that email is a much more forgiving medium - your conversion rates could be half as good through email but still be 50 times better off in terms of cost per sale!

However, there is a business risk involved in this channel migration. If you ask people to “tune out” of nasty, expensive, un-green direct mail then you put pressure on your email marketing to perform. In my experience over the past decade across Europe there are very few client companies that have optimised their email marketing strategy and execution to make this risky channel migration pay. So I was delighted to read a case study from Marketing Sherpa today that suggests some steps all companies can take to reduce risk AND increase sales.

To summarise, an independent travel agent encouraged people to opt into their email programme to reduce the costs of servicing customers – all good so far! But in order to stimulate sales they decided to run a multi-channel campaign. With some simple data appending on their prospect file (adding life-stage and income variables is easy if you have a post-code), they selected the most affluent prospects for the campaign, as well as targeting all existing customers. They then used a combination of direct mail and email to promote personalised offers, with a range of on and off-line calls to action.

Here is the personalised post-card, with a "reminder" of the previous transaction in the heading.

And here is the email message, with the same "reminder" of previously-enjoyed holidays... 

 
Now here’s the good stuff...

“The team noticed that those who received both the print and email communications were twice as likely to visit their personalized web pages.

- 6% of those who received only email visited their webpage
- 12% of those who received both email and direct mail visited their webpage

That doubling in response also translated to twice the conversion rate and twice the revenue from customers who received both communications, as opposed to customers who only received one communication.”

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31299

The conclusion for me is clear. Our customers live in a multi-channel world and as marketers we need to embrace “non-line marketing”...using channel-neutral planning to harness all direct channels to engage with people. Humble direct mail can be used to re-enforce on-line messages and drive prospects to web sites in much the same way that email can be used to drive footfall to physical stores. And when we use both these channels in well-planned, targeted campaigns we enjoy conversion rates far beyond that which each channel achieves on its own. That’s heartening news for the direct marketing industry!

Many marketers work in a multi-channel world because their customers use different channels to engage with them.  One of the biggest challenges is tracking the off-line to on-line marketing experience; getting people to go on-line is not hard as we can shout "visit our website" in our ads and give them the web address.  But how successful are those campaigns, and how do we attribute on-line success to off-line campaigns?

One option is to create "vanity urls" that we expect people to remember and then type correctly, never mind just googling (or Binging?) the company and campaign key words.  The result is that many successful outcomes will end up being attributed to Mr Google simly because people can't be bothered to type things into address bars any more! If you want a comprehensive run-down of all the multi-channel tracking options then Avinash Kaushik has several posts that cover it admirably.

Here are a couple of examples from the world of retail.  

One quick (old and quaint?) way is to simply stick up a poster and ask people to email somebody.  It ticks most of the registration boxes...its quick, uses universally accessed media and has a simple "value exchange".  You could have different email addresses for regions of retailers, or for different incentives and there is no marginal cost of acquiring a new contact. Its easy to measure the success of these tactics and develop better versions over time. Maybe texting in your email address to a short-code number could tap into a medium that people may hold in their pocket/handbags rather than relying on people jotting down an email address on a scrap of paper and finding it when they got home.

However, Facebook has muscled it's way onto my High Street (Reigate, Surrey, England) with an altogether more robust proposition.  A clothes retailer has created a Facebook group (free, takes 10 minutes), has built a simple value proposition (20% off if you join our group), and now has the chance to push people back in store AND develop a longer term relationship.  In these difficult recessionary times I applaud any retailer who is brave and smart enough to look at exploiting a multi-channel relationship. And with the lovely people at Facebook still blasting out emails to your group members for free, its a pretty cost-efficient way to beat the credit-crunch.