Combination of Direct Mail and Web-Based Campaigns
2009 saw a boom in the use of web-based campaigns, and the trend will continue in 2010 with the integration of direct mail and these web-based methods. Customers will receive more print marketing products in the mail that direct them to visit personalized URLs that deliver targeted information.
Future marketing campaigns will deliver a cohesive yet targeted message along multiple marketing channels. One area that will specifically benefit from this tactic is customer loyalty programs. Companies that use a customer loyalty program can deliver targeted messages via mail and email based on the purchasing habits of each specific customer. However, companies will also look to communicate with its customers through social media tools, such as Facebook and Twitter.
As reported in Deliver Magazine, Dave Frankland, principal analyst at Forrester Research, notes that companies have to maintain a centralized customer view, “We started out with mailing addresses and email addresses, but as we’re able to get other types of information like Twitter handles and cell phone numbers, we need to be able to hold on to that singular view of the customer.”
Trends in Email Marketing
Over the last few years, email marketing has been extremely popular because of its low cost as compared to direct mail marketing. The recent economic downturn gave an additional boost to email marketing as companies found their marketing budgets being squeezed. Email marketing will continue to grow in 2010, but not just because of its low cost.
Email marketing has great ROI, which is getting the attention of C-level executives as they plan their strategies for 2010. The three big trends for email marketing in 2010 are:
• Segmentation – As visitors and customers provide more detailed information to marketers, companies will be segmenting their marketing efforts, pushing messages to the leads that are most likely to buy. For example, a company with three segmented marketing campaigns will see a larger ROI than from one general marketing campaign.
• Web Analytics – Web analytic tools will become more powerful and more detailed, allowing companies to perform extremely detailed tracking of the response to their email marketing campaigns, and calculate ROI in ways that were never before possible. Ed Henrick of ClickZ notes, “The problem with email is that its “cheap,” so direct marketers who are used to doing analytics for cost avoidance need to focus on analytics for revenue generation. The models need to focus on what to send, not who to suppress.”
• Integration with Social Media – One of the big trends in 2009 was the boom in social media usage by both marketers and consumers. The push in 2010 will be to generate email campaigns that seamlessly integrate with social media campaigns and direct mail marketing campaigns. Marketers will be integrating Facebook pages and ads, Twitter messages, and personalized URLs with email marketing.
Despite these trends, marketers still have to achieve “deliverability” with their email messages, because consumers are receiving more and more email messages every day, and are savvy enough to filter out unwanted messages.
Other Direct Marketing Trends for 2010
Outsourcing Direct Marketing Activities
Many companies have not only reduced their direct marketing budgets, but have also reduced their number of in-house staff, while trying to maintain, if not increase, their operational and marketing activities. This trend has resulted in more and more companies looking to production firms to assist them with the design, development, and execution of direct marketing activities. Direct marketing production vendors provide expertise and efficiencies that can save companies money by allowing them to focus on their core responsibilities while the vendor acts as an extension of their marketing department.
Measurement/Analysis
The state of the economy has forced companies to look at every cent of their marketing budget in terms of ROI. Because budgets have been reduced, every action needs to be efficient and responsive. Management needs to see how their marketing dollars are being spent, and how effective each activity is. Advanced measurement tools allow companies to track and measure every step of every campaign to determine its success.
Liz Miller, vice president of programs and operations for the CMO Council goes one step further in Deliver Magazine, insisting that organizations extend their ROI measurement to their complete marketing supply chain. “Don’t focus on the return at the expense of managing investment costs. Map, track, measure and put a dollar amount on everything you do.”
Kaynak
Ballantine Corporation
