How does direct mail fit into a multichannel approach to marketing?
Multi-channel marketing uses the full suite of marketing tools available to today’s business to open up multiple communication channels between themselves and their market; channels which can be used to capture data, promote, purchase and share.
Multichannel marketing tools embrace the traditional direct mail, advertising and sales promotion combined with the new generation of digital channels such as email marketing, websites, SMS, Mobile marketing and social media, all with the aim of making it easier for the customer to interact with the business or brand in a way that suits them.
Recent studies have apparently shown that cross-channel marketing drives consumers to spend up to ten times more than single-channel marketing. Of course to achieve these results different multi-channel tools need to be used at the right time, just as with traditional marketing campaign models.
For example whilst social media has received much of the attention recently, as a lead generation tool direct mail may be more effective in the early stages of a campaign. Recently, business expert Matt Eve of Betterbusinessresults.com expressed the view that social media was too time consuming as a sales tool due to the insatiable demand for content and many small businesses would be better off investing their time into direct mail.
Multichannel marketing also creates numerous opportunities for data collection and sharing between marketing tools, insights which can be exploited by using direct mail or emails in a more frequent smaller scale and targeted manner.
This does create the need for direct mail to become more flexible and stealthy as opposed to large scale mailings of the past, but fortunately some of the latest technology in areas like hybrid mail make mailings far more targetable on a granular level than in the past.
