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Are You Leveraging all the Elements
of the Multichannel Mix?
Integrating Your Media to Maximize
Effectiveness
Case Study: The Phoenician Utilizes
Integrated Multichannel Marketing
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ARE YOU LEVERAGING ALL THE ELEMENTS
OF THE MULTICHANNEL MIX? |
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Integrated Direct Marketing (IDM®) integrates and sequences media and message through an understanding of the customer’s time dimension. In other words, where is the customer within his or her life cycle?
The Customer Life Cycle is made up of three stages:
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In the presale period, customers are researching their needs and separating the wheat from the chaff. Marketers respond with integrated media and sales strategies to surround the customer with information and informed choices.
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The sale stage brings the opportunity for “thank you” marketing, which is always productive but rarely done. At one large technology company, branch managers were asked to place calls to mid-market customers who had just made a significant purchase. The customers were dumbfounded. They never knew this person even existed – and they were tickled to know their business was appreciated.
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The growth and retention phase is most often disregarded. And yet it provides significant opportunity to engage the customer in interactive ongoing communications. The opportunities include consultative needs assessment, problem identification and resolution, increased market penetration and repeat sales.
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Based on this life cycle, different messages and different media are deployed in accordance with customer opt-in preferences to provide them with the information they require to move to the next stage, and to create an interactive dialogue where both parties listen and learn. This enables us to better meet customers’ ongoing and future needs.
The IDM multichannel mix includes a palette of at least seven brilliant colors:
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PR
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Direct response print advertising
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Internet
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E-mail
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Direct mail
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Inbound and outbound telecontact
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Field sales channels.
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If you’re not using the full media mix palette, your marketing plan is going to look more like a paint-by-numbers using only one color than the brilliant Van Gogh that it should.
®IDM is a registered trademark of Ernan Roman Direct Marketing
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| LETTER FROM ERNAN |
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I recently spoke at a national conference about deploying multichannels per the opt-in preferences of customers and prospects. After my presentation, a young man, looking somewhat vexed, approached me. “I’ve followed your process – even did Voice of Customer Research – and I’m not getting double-digit response rates!” he exclaimed. Intrigued, I invited him to walk with me to my next presentation.
As we talked, I learned that his company’s direct marketing response rates were declining sharply. While searching for ways to increase response, my new friend had stumbled across my book, Opt-In Marketing: Increase Sales Exponentially with Consensual Marketing.
He told me how he followed the prescribed process, created a plan and presented it to senior management to get buy-in. He studied their customer base, and conducted Voice of Customer Research. He used that research to redesign many of their direct mail pieces. He began testing various offers among different customer segments. While all of this effort had slowed the drop in response, he hadn’t broken the double-digit barrier yet.
Baffled, he looked to me for advice. I had only one question: “What are you doing besides direct mail?”
It turns out he was relying only on direct mail – putting all of his eggs in one basket. After briefing him on the importance of an integrated multichannel mix, I wished him good luck and asked that he keep me up to date on his progress.
He is currently retooling his marketing plan to include multichannels. It occurred to me that sometimes we as direct marketers get myopic in our quest for the perfect mailer. So this month’s newsletter focuses on the optimal media mix and how to use that mix for maximum effectiveness.
Happy reading, and don’t forget to keep sending me your thoughts, questions and suggestions, at ernan@erdm.com.
Best wishes,
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| NEXT MONTH |
We’ll be discussing e-mail and how best to integrate it into the multichannel mix. Email us us your story about how you’ve used e-mail as part of your marketing mix to achieve stellar results, and we’ll include it in our next newsletter!
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| ADDITIONAL RESOURCES |
To learn more, go to Case Studies / Tips for You. Also go to Our Books to review Opt-In Marketing: Increase Sales Exponentially with Consensual Marketing.
Contact Us for a complimentary consultation to discuss your needs and how the Consensual Marketing / Opt-In Process (CMO) may satisfy them. |
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Click here for additional customer relationship management solutions case studies.
We wish you the best of luck in using the Voice-of-Customer-driven 3-Step Marketing Process to achieve double-digit response. |
