When it comes to marketing, small businesses can easily spend a lot of money, for little return. Be it magazine ads, mailers, radio, website or email marketing, response rates of 0-1% are common. Even when there’s no sales, we’re told to continue spending all this money for ‘branding’…
Step back and consider some alternatives. For example, underwear merchant Bare Necessities in the US recently tested coordinating a postcard campaign with email to a segment of its customer file and saw a significant increase in revenue from those who received both marketing messages.
According to David Wauters, director of marketing for Bare Necessities, the company saw a 15% lift in revenue (note that’s SALES, not just a response rate boost) from customers who received the direct mail postcard and the email, compared to the control group who received only the email.
Wauters has apparently stumbled on something that a lot of marketers talk about, but seldom do. A relative few marketers truly coordinate their email and print efforts, according to Jane Kaiser, president of online marketing consultancy Eclipse Direct Marketing. She said her clients consistently see lifts of between 15% and 25% when they send coordinated print and email campaigns.
But wait there’s more!
If you’re satisfied with a 15-25% improvement then a simple combined email and direct mail postcard is a no-brainer. After all, who wouldn’t be delighted with amazing results like this?
However sales improvements of 50% or more are now possible using PURLs. Here we take the above a step further. We simply add a unique webpage link to both the email and postcard. A great Video by small business marketing expert, David Frey, outlines this very exciting, simple concept.
Here at CQ, we’ve the expertise to build your own personalised landing page and direct mail piece to complement your own email campaign, or provide a complete purl webpage, email and variable print turnkey package. Note our PURL package has special features beyond that outlined in the video.
Best of all? It’s all remarkably easy, affordable and just perfect for any corporate, small business or community group – You heard it here first!
Topic: databases, direct mail, marketing, Media Link, Personalisation, postcards, Print to Web, PURL's, ROI
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