As these difficult trading conditions continue many organisations are looking at ways to reduce their direct marketing costs without adversely affecting sales.  One quick win has been trying to migrate customers from expensive off-line channels to cheaper on-line ones; speaking to people through email, at about half a pence a message, is a more attractive than saying the same thing through direct mail at maybe fifty pence a message.  This cost-differential (email is 100 times cheaper than direct mail) means that email is a much more forgiving medium – your conversion rates could be half as good through email but still be 50 times better off in terms of cost per sale!

However, there is a business risk involved in this channel migration.  If you ask people to “tune out” of nasty, expensive, un-green direct mail then you put pressure on your email marketing to perform.  In my experience over the past decade across Europe there are very few client companies that have optimised their email marketing strategy and execution to make this risky channel migration pay. So I was delighted to read a case study from Marketing Sherpa today that suggests some steps all companies can take to reduce risk AND increase sales.

To summarise, an independent travel agent encouraged people to opt into their email programme to reduce the costs of servicing customers – all good so far!  But in order to stimulate sales they decided to run a multi-channel campaign.  With some simple data appending on their prospect file (adding life-stage and income variables is easy if you have a post-code), they selected the most affluent prospects for the campaign, as well as targeting all existing customers.  They then used a combination of direct mail and email to promote personalised offers, with a range of on and off-line calls to action.

Now here’s the good stuff…

“The team noticed that those who received both the print and email communications were twice as likely to visit their personalized web pages.”

• 6% of those who received only email visited their webpage
• 12% of those who received both email and direct mail visited their webpage

That doubling in response also translated to twice the conversion rate and twice the revenue from customers who received both communications, as opposed to customers who only received one communication.”

The conclusion for me is clear.  Our customers live in a multi-channel world and as marketers we need to embrace “non-line marketing”…using channel-neutral planning to harness all direct channels to engage with people.  Humble direct mail can be used to re-enforce on-line messages and drive prospects to web sites in much the same way that email can be used to drive footfall to physical stores.  And when we use both these channels in well-planned, targeted campaigns we enjoy conversion rates far beyond that which each channel achieves on its own.  That’s heartening news for the direct marketing industry!