Marketers must invest in multichannel approach

Generating high levels of response, conversion or brand engagement is never easy in direct marketing. Unquestionably, it is vital to pick the right mix of channels. However, as channels have proliferated — mail, email, SMS, telemarketing— settling on the appropriate ones and giving them the optimum weighting is becoming more problematic.

“Consumers have preferences for different channels at different times of the day,” says Direct Marketing Association (DMA) director of media channel development, Robert Keitch. “No one channel is going to do it for you — end of story. The days of having a simplistic mix are gone.

It comes down to understanding who the customer is.”Consumer habits are evolving; for example, people now spend more time interacting with the web or their mobiles than sitting passively in front of the TV. Richard Higginbotham , head of marketing at marketing services provider CDMS, believes many marketers have as yet failed to exploit this shift.

“Once the customer has been identified, successful multi-channel implementation allows the marketer to actually contact the customer through the channel they prefer,” he says. “Ensuring customers are receiving communications through a medium to which they are responsive is key to producing customer satisfaction and improving ROI.”

There is plenty of evidence that a multichannel approach to direct marketing tends to deliver far better results than concentration on a single touchpoint. Research from Royal Mail, for instance, has found that integrating digital advertising with direct mail campaigns can increase customer spend by almost 25%, while 55% of ‘confident web users’ prefer to be contacted by a combination of direct mail and online .Anthony Miller, head of media development at Royal Mail, says this shows that consumers recognise the benefits of online, email and direct mail for different types of communications — and how well they work together.

Chris Bourke, managing director of mobile ad agency Aerodeon, meanwhile, disputes the received wisdom that SMS is an unpopular direct channel, claiming it can deliver response rates higher than either email or mail. Brands that have experimented with mobile over the past two years are consolidating their lessons and developing mobile marketing strategies.

Personalised communications that cut through the clutter are becoming more important . To achieve this, marketers and agencies need to understand their customers as never before. “We now have access to sophisticated tools that enable us to track consumers’ media consumption, online behaviour and purchasing habits, which we can use to create an individual and tailored communication strategy — bringing us closer to that single customer ,” says Andy Snuggs, managing director of digital agency Geronimo. “Because of the prevalence of personalised communications, consumers expect to be treated on a personal basis, whatever the medium.”

Relevance is rooted in a detailed understanding of customer behaviour, whether based on actual knowledge or intelligent assumptions . Taking a strategic and creative approach to direct marketing is the best way to ensure that the right response is generated more often.

Channel selection plays a key role and should be based on an understanding of how the target audience wants to interact with a brand, coupled with knowledge of their stage in the buying cycle. “The intrusiveness of SMS makes it a poor tool for cold acquisition but its immediacy makes it ideal for informing customers their car insurance renewal is imminent,” says Heather Westgate, chief executive of direct agency TDA.

Coffee brand Lavazza used Experian’s Mosaic lifestyle data when profiling the ‘best’ customers on its database and deciding whether to target them with money-off coupons by direct mail or email. The activity achieved a response rate of over 22%. Lavazza UK marketing manager Claire Rushworth adds that the learnings from every campaign are fed back into the database, thus helping to increase the success of further campaigns.

As consumers’ media behaviour evolves, marketers who choose the most appropriate channels for their message will reap the benefits.