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.
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