How much impact can synergy between offline and online marketing have on conversion? MarketingExperiments labs reported a 124% conversion increase from tying online efforts to an offline direct mail campaign even though there was no direct link between the two campaigns.

 

MarketingExperiments labs ran a test to judge the effect of relatively small adjustments made to an online campaign to connect it with a company’s offline direct mail campaign. For example, the photos used in the direct mail were replicated and so were a few of the direct mail techniques like faux handwritten messages.

 

MarketingExperiments labs reported: “For the two weeks of the direct mail efforts, the test treatments outperformed the control by up to 124%. This is a significant increase and clearly demonstrates the potential impact and effect of offline efforts on our Internet campaigns.

 

“After the direct mail sends concluded, the results reverted to a non-significant difference. It was only during the direct mail efforts that the impact of the treatment was felt. This underscores the impact that offline efforts can have online.”

 

Other recent tests I have seen in the industry press, while judging the recent DMA ECHO awards, and from colleagues continue to confirm the positive effect direct mail has on online efforts.

 

MarketingExperiments, in its own words, “is a research laboratory with a simple (but not easy) seven-word mission statement: To discover what really works in optimization.” 

This experiment was reported in The MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal

The Second Quarter of 2010 (See “Integrate Your Marketing,” page 6, for more on the experiment discussed above.)

 

USPS pitches print catalogs, Frank Washkuch, DMNews, July 26, 2010

 

The fact that positive word of mouth and referrals influence small business owners’ purchasing decisions is no surprise. What is interesting to me is that female small business owners are more likely than male owners to tell everybody who they think might be interested about a positive experience they’ve had with a business supplier (according to the Enterprise Council on Small Business). If female small business owners are your target market, you should be aware of this multiplier effect and be prepared to nurture it in your ongoing targeted marketing efforts. Here are more factoids:

 

According to research reported by the Enterprise Council on Small Business, in comparison to their male counterparts, female small business owners are:

• more active participants in their industry associations
• more likely than men to be active users of online social networking sites
• more often members of their town or city’s chamber of commerce, and thus
• more likely to interact with members of other segments of the small business market
  that you may be targeting

 

Source: Enterprise Council on Small Business

 

Personalized. Relevant. We heard it everywhere at Digital Marketing Days in New York. Keynoter Christa Carone, CMO of Xerox Corp., noted that, in a world of information overload and despite the rise of social networks, true marketing value comes from the customer experience, not technology. Carone said: “Despite the flood of media messages, people remember little more than one-tenth of 1% of them.”

 

In a workshop at the conference, Richard Bonfiglio, director of customer marketing at industrial supplies distributor MSC Industrial Direct, reported that, faced with dwindling sales as the recession intensified last year, his company conducted Voice of the Customer (VOC) research that included dozens of telephone interviews of up to an hour each, with both customers and noncustomers, to help the company refine its understanding of sales trends.

 

“We were losing sales, but we weren't losing customers,” Bonfiglio said of the VOC research findings. “They were just changing the way they purchase.” For instance, many customers were making more frequent but smaller orders so that they would have less inventory on hand, which encouraged MSC to emphasize its high fill rates and speedy turnaround times in its communications.

Page 1 of 8  1 2 3 >  Last »