What Is Cross Media Marketing?
Cross Media Marketing is a way for marketers to both improve their marketing ROI while also gaining more visibility
. It is 1:1 targeted marketing which allows for the interaction of your marketing across print, email and the web.
Higher ROI from Cross Media Marketing comes from higher response rates. The higher response rates are the result of personalized contact with your prospect, rather than the traditional shotgun approach to marketing. Let me give you an example.
Once a client hires me as a marketing consultant, I lead with questions like this.
How was your business last year?
How much growth would you like to see this year?
Describe your perfect customer to me. (All companies have some customers that contribute to their bottom line better than others do. Companies know this, but they may never have actually identified exactly why those customers are their "preferred" type of customer.)
Once you figure out what makes the perfect customer, how do you find a prospect that would be that perfect customer for your company?
How do you pre-qualify a prospect to make sure you're not wasting your sales time on the wrong person?
How big of a benefit would it be to you to be able to ask just a few questions of your prospects to see if they fit your definition of your perfect target customer?"
I ask my client if they have a created a marketing plan that identifies the characteristics that make up their ideal customer. Some companies have done this, some haven't. My job as a marketing consultant is to help them gather information that they need to effectively define their target audience. Then use the data we gather to create a marketing plan that focuses on bringing them their ideal customer.
I'll introduce the Cross Media Marketing concept as a tool that I use to gather data from the existing customers that are their "best" customers and use the information I collect to create a targeted marketing campaign directed at their prospects. The information the prospects reveal as they participate in the campaign will be used to determine if the prospect fits the definition of my client's perfect customer.
Let's pretend I want to sell to a Recreational Vehicle dealership. I get an appointment with the marketing manager and go through my presentation with him. Let's say he admits their sales fell off the past couple of years and they're not sure how to bring the sales back up. They really want to increase accessory sales to RV owners.
I explain how we can use their existing database of satisfied customers and generate a campaign using email and variable data print to survey their best accessory customers. The questions we ask in the survey will be used to find similarities among their best customers. As an incentive for the customer to take the survey, we can offer to enter them into a drawing for a $500 gift card or use some other promotional item.
The similarities could be things like age, income, how they use RV, other hobbies or interests the owners have, etc. Then once that data is analyzed, we look for recurring patterns among the majority of the customers. This data is used to create a profile of the ideal customer for that dealership.
In the next part of the campaign, we use that profile to create parameters we give to a mailing list company. Instead of buying a list that will only blanket a geographic area by zip code, we buy a list of pre-qualified prospective RV buyers. We create another campaign to connect with the pre-qualified prospects, hopefully resulting in sales for the dealership.
Let's look closer at the Variable Data Postcard. The postcard will have data fields inserted into the design of the card. The variable data fields can be for the customer's name, pURL, type of RV they bought, the date they bought it, picture of their particular RV, etc. Any information the dealership has collected about the customer can be used as a variable field on the card.
That postcard has information in those fields that is relative to that particular recipient so we refer to it as a 1:1 postcard, or as a personalized postcard. A personalized postcard is the exact opposite of a static postcard. A static postcard has the same information on every recipient's card with the only variable data being the address that is printed on the card. Static cards are blanket marketing whereas a personalized postcard is targeted marketing.
Both static and personalized postcards are forms of direct mail. There is a higher cost to produce the personalized postcard. So, if a client looks only at the price to print and mail the cards, he might balk at spending the money for the personalization. It's my job to provide him with information about the relative effectiveness of static versus personalized campaigns to get him to consider the cost per response, rather than the cost to produce the mailing piece.
Static mail campaigns are lucky to receive a 1 - 1.5% response rate, but personalized mail campaigns can have 10%, 15% or even greater response. Let's look at an example that compares a static mailing with a 1.5% response rate to a personalized mailing with a 10% response rate.
Let's pretend we're mailing 3,000 static and 3,000 personalized postcards. The static cards cost $.50/card and the personalized cards cost twice as much at $1.00/each. The production cost for static cards is $1500.00 and the cost for personalized cards is $3,000.00.
The static card only generates 45 responses (3000 cards x 1.5%). When we divide the $1500 production cost by the 45 responses we see the cost per response is $33.00.
The personalized postcard's 10% response rate means there are 300 responses (3,000 cards x 10%). Dividing the $3,000 production cost by the 300 responses, you see that the cost per response for the personalized car is only $10.00.
Although the production cost is twice as much for the personalized cards, the cost per response is only about a third of the static card.
Finally, here are some statistics that show why you might want to consider Variable Data Print for direct mail campaigns.
Customers buy more. 25% higher dollar orders are generated from VDP mailing.
Customers make buying decisions quicker. There is a 34% improvement in response time from VDP campaign recipients.
Customers come back. There is 48% increased customer retention by companies using variable data mailing.
by: Milan Chovan
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