Traditional printed circulars have proven to be significantly more popular and effective among today’s shoppers than electronic-based direct marketing materials, according to a new Nielsen survey.

The market research company’s Evolution of Circulars survey, published last month, found that printed marketing materials such as direct mail, newspaper inserts, and in-store catalogues were the most popular of all retail-related direct marketing materials, with roughly 60 per cent of consumers looking at them once a week.

Additionally, the survey unearthed a surprise finding that direct mail is marginally more effective on the ‘Millenial’ generation than on the older Generation-X shoppers, confounding the common belief that the future of marketing will be solely online.

Taking in a sample number of 11,000 shoppers, the Nielsen poll also found that a whopping 90 per cent of shoppers surveyed wished to continue receiving paper-based marketing materials at home or in-store, while only 70 per cent expressed the desire for electronic messaging delivery.

One of the trends picked up in the survey was the shift of in-store marketing materials to mobile devices, with 18 per cent of shoppers using a mobile phone to see what’s available in-store and 33 per cent using a tablet device, with almost two-thirds of shoppers researching that information from home computers.

What the direct marketing industry can take away from this survey is the knowledge that, while digital and mobile marketing channels are well and truly on the rise, it will not be to the detriment of traditional channels, but in addition to printed marketing materials.

Source: Directmag

Every year, marketers search for the next big thing that will make or break the success of their interactive marketing campaigns. A lot of buzzwords like “mobile” or “social” inevitably get thrown around but what does it really mean for marketers? Before you refresh marketing goals for 2011, here are five resolutions to consider.

1. Make data the foundation of your marketing

Collecting data has never been a problem as we know that it fuels our marketing programs and overall business decisions. But achieving visibility and usability is often another story. Many times information is stored in data warehouses and databases across the organisation and tedious exporting needs to be undertaken before being able to take any action. Simply put, many marketers are missing opportunities to engage with customers because their information and processes have become outdated before the customer engagement metrics are aggregated and sorted.

Making a change to the way you currently use click-through rates, online browsing history, shopping cart abandonment, previous purchase history, and other customer information starts with an assessment. Understanding what tools you have before you take action will pay off in the long run.

2. Use mobile to connect with customers

Mobile marketing is often overshadowed as social media and email marketing becomes more sophisticated. But as consumers rapidly begin to adopt smartphones, mobile marketing can no longer be viewed as a “silo” in a marketing campaign.

One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to begin mobile marketing is SMS. Creating text-in voting programs, Q&A text response campaigns and mobile coupons for your target audience are simple tactics to engage customers. Developing content that is specifically designed for mobile phones is also important – perhaps you might even consider creating a mobile app for your company.

3. Market to customers as individuals

It’s all too easy to be swept away by the creativity of the advertising instead of its relevance. Prioritising customer service before sales is crucial and there are some innovative and simple ways to do this. One example is to listen and be a part of the conversations that are happening online about your company. There are many online monitoring tools available to easily do this and you’ll be surprised by the amount of insight you’ll receive from listening to you customers.

4. Make social media a real part of the marketing mix

For many, 2010 marked the year that social media became a reality instead of just a trend for marketers to watch out for. We know that in the past, customers who had a bad experience with your brand would share it with 5 of their different friends but today, a bad customer experience could lead to negative information about your brand posted to 500 Twitter followers.

One way to integrate social media into your campaigns is to do some social ‘soul searching’. Gather metrics about who is hitting the ‘like’ button on Facebook, who is re-tweeting and what content attracts more user engagement. Another simple tactic is to use social media to gather local data. Geolocation devices and apps such as Foursquare give you the opportunity to find out who is visiting your store and how often.

5. Engage in ‘smart’ automation

In any campaign, there are some jobs that are tedious and time-consuming but remain essential. At the same time, marketing budgets aren’t getting any bigger so marketers need to find ways to work smarter, not harder.

With so much data to manage, automation is a great way to make information usable. Marketers can engage in ‘smart’ automation tools that integrate new customer data and preferences such as tweets on Twitter or likes on Facebook into every communication that is sent out.

Each new year offers a blank slate and a new outlook to start the year off right. And while you may not stay as organised as you’d like or as in shape as you had hoped by mid-year, making resolutions to improve your interactive marketing program can be well worth the investment.

With Americans spending nearly a quarter of their time online on social networking sites and blogs (a 43% increase from just a year ago, according to a recent study by Nielsen), there is no reason marketers should not be taking advantage of these new communication platforms. People see, hear, and touch more marketing messages than ever before. To stay top of mind with your audience, it is important to be where they are at all times and embrace these new avenues of communication.

Many companies have created Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles as another way to connect with customers and prospects. Social media provide customers one more way to interact with you and provide prospects a non-invasive way to learn more about your company.

That’s just a first step, however. From there you need to incorporate them into your email and direct mail marketing campaigns so that you can better grow your network and increase brand exposure.

In email communications, you can add “follow us” and “connect with us” icons that are easily clicked on or a one-liner that says, for example, “follow us at ….” for each social media platform you use. Adding similar one-liners to your complementary printed marketing pieces will also drive traffic to your social media sites and increase exposure. The ability to incorporate social media platforms into both your email and direct mail campaigns can help unify your marketing efforts and enable you to better reach both customers and prospects.

When placing social media links—or any URLs, really—on direct mail pieces, keeping them short and easy to remember is a must. Long URLs are more likely to be misspelled when people retype them into a Web browser.

Social media platforms present an entirely different reason for using short URLs. On Twitter a tweet, or post, can be no longer than 140 characters. So if your link is 125 characters long, you’d have no room left to tell your followers about the link and why they should click on it.  

Because they make printed materials interactive, quick-response, or QR, codes are another way to integrate media. No matter where someone is, he can simply pull out his phone, scan a QR code, and instantly be directed to a Website, a video, a landing page, or any other piece of targeted information. The technology can be taken one step further to incorporate email: The QR code can direct customers or prospects to a landing page that will request their contact information, including email address, before sending them to a designated Website. Armed with that information, you can send a follow-up email with additional information, links to your social media profiles, and the like.

Taking a multichannel approach when it comes to your marketing strategy soon will become a requirement. If you have a variety of age groups and demographics within your audience, the chances are strong that each group spends the majority of time on different marketing media. Some groups might best be reached via a print ad in a magazine or a direct mail piece; others might respond more favourably to an email. 

Social media now accounts for 23% of America’s online time. Integrating them into your current marketing strategies is simple—so why not take advantage of the opportunity and communicate with your customers where they are most interested?

John Foley, Jr., is the founder/CEO of marketing solutions provider interlinkONE.

The QR Codes were assembled into the shapes of animals that live hidden in the city and posted all over the streets of Hong Kong.

Scanning the codes in the animals allowed users to read more information about a band and hear their music. They could also purchase the songs directly as well as share them on social media.

The campaign was considered a success by the volume of sharing on blogs and social networks and the fact that more than half of the 14 bands sold out their albums within the first week.

The video below shows elements of the campaign with an English commentary, starting at the 30sec mark.

The QR code, or quick response code, is simply a two-dimensional bar code that came into being in 1994 and found a large audience in Japan. Stateside, however, QR codes — while clever for tying real-world objects to online content — have always remained on the outskirts of public awareness.

Nonetheless, we’ve seen QR codes employed for creative purposes. The Detroit Red Wings interactive programs and the giant QR codes in Times Square come to mind. Each of these serves as prime examples of how QR codes could be on the verge of their breakout moment.

What the technology needs in order to finally make it to the mainstream are applications that take the nerd-factor out of the QR code scan, and drive home the potential rewards of seeing a code, scanning it, and then engaging with the served-up content.

Stickybits and SCVNGR are startups that integrate the barcode scan in intelligent and fun ways. They’re poised to propel the movement of the next generation QR code, and here’s why.

The Potential of Collective Scanning

Stickybits brings context to real-world objects with its next generation approach to the QR code. The mobile app is primarily a barcode scanner — powered by Red Laser — but it takes the technology into the realm of fun by creating a social and shared experience around any item in the physical world that possesses a barcode.

Download the iPhone or Android application, scan your favorite cereal box, add an item — maybe a related recipe, but any video, photo, audio clip or comment will do — and you’ve just started a digital thread around that item.

Where Stickybits succeeds is in making the scan feel familiar. People have already caught on to using Red Laser to scan barcodes on packages for comparison pricing. So Stickybits is nothing more than a barcode scanner for comparison multimedia conversations. Same idea, different application.

It’s this approach that could finally help to bridge the gap between barcodes on packages and the still unfamiliar QR codes popping up in the real world. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Stickybits scans standard barcodes and QR codes, which eliminates the need for users to hunt down other QR code scanner apps.

Of course, Stickybits offers tons of potential for both brands and marketers. The service essentially creates a social graph around things (products), so that alone makes it a new platform for digital exposure.

The brands and marketers that can motivate fans to take to product-related conversation chains via Stickybits, with or without a nudge in the right direction, could find a distinct advantage over competitors. This is especially true for brands that find meaningful ways to participate, even it if is just by listening or following along. In this way, Stickybits is like a new frontier for savvy early adopter brands.

Stickybits also makes more aggressive brand plays possible. Pepsi, for example, signed on as a sponsor. Stickybits users who scan Pepsi cans and other Pepsi products will see a sponsored message from Pepsi atop the bits threads. It’s somewhat akin to Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, and could prove to be both a money-making vehicle for Stickybits and an alternative way for advertisers to get exposure.

Success in this realm will certainly depend on the branded message that scanners see. Anything too pushy will discourage app users from scanning product barcodes, which would be a lose-lose for everyone.

For more guerilla-style street campaigns, Stickybits sells barcode stickers, and users can print codes onto gear or download and print their own codes from home.

Gaming and QR Codes, A Perfect Match

Location-based services have been around for years. Loopt and Brightkite were early pioneers in encouraging mobile owners to share their location with friends via GPS-enabled devices.

Both services are still around today and each have their own appeal, but Foursquare, the second coming of Dodgeball, has pushed location-sharing into mainstream hands. Foursquare did it by hooking users with simple and engaging game mechanics, and now everyone, especially Yelp, is anxious to follow suit.

SCVNGR — which bills itself as a mobile way to participate in place-based, scavenger hunt-like challenges — is in part a check-in application, but with the gaming experience at the core of the service. Users can check-in at a venue using the SCVNGR mobile app, but it’s what happens after the check-in that makes this an application worthy of note.

SCVNGR is all about activity, and while it can be used as a Foursquare alternative, there’s so much business appeal here that it kind of exists in a new category of its own. Cities, museums, small businesses, universities and even brokers have already turned to SCVNGR to create their own location-based treks for customers or fans.

goSmithsonian, for instance, used SCVNGR to build a trek through nine of the Smithsonian museums that require solving clues and completing challenges. More recently The Boston Globe’s trek involved five different content-driven, city-based challenges. Treks are about mobile, challenge-based discovery, so they’re certainly Foursquare and Gowalla-esque in nature, but as the Smithsonian and The Boston Globe examples demonstrate, there’s more here than just checkins.

It’s within these challenges and treks where QR codes make their appearance and find real-life relevance. SCVNGR supports QR code challenges, so players can be tasked to scan a QR code to complete the challenge and earn the points. Of course, the QR code challenge is also a nearly fail-proof way to ensure that a player is where they say they are, which means it adds verification to the checkin.

Since the application doubles as a QR code scanner, the scanning activity happens right within the game and helps to familiarize users with the foreign notion of a barcode scan. It’s this familiarization that will help make QR codes recognizable and decodable to the human eye.

Obviously marketers and brands alike have shown an increasing interest in creative location-based initiatives. As interest continues to grow in this space, SCVNGR has a solid shot at becoming the de facto mobile application to facilitate mobile scavenger hunts, and propel QR codes to mainstream adoption.

Challenges Still Remain

Amidst all the possibilities, barcode scanning apps and services still face a number of obstacles before the general public will embrace them.

The biggest hurdle is the fact that there are so many disparate applications that support QR code scanning, each with their own purpose or twist. Of course, there’s also custom barcode/scanner services like Microsoft Tag, which is progressive in its own way but requires that users have a special app (they can’t use generic QR code scanners) to process Tag codes in the real world.

It’s asking too much of people to make them distinguish between a regular barcode, a QR code and some other custom code. We need simplification and standards.

The barcode scan is also heavily dependent on the user wanting to interact with it. They have to pull out their smartphone, load up an app and scan the code in question. It’s a matter of a few seconds, but the barcode is likely a missed opportunity, lost in the real world as real people race to get from point A to point B. Thankfully, Stickybits and SCVNGR both tackle the “why should I scan this?” problem, and we’ll be watching closely to see if that’s enough to push this edgy technology beyond the niche.

Introduced in October at MPA’s Magazine Innovation Summit, hy.pr was developed specifically to extend the reach of print publications and the life of their content by allowing readers to share links to the articles they read in print with their online social networks.  According to Smub, "With hy.pr, every reader is a potential social media marketer for the publication. By providing readers the tools to push content instantly to their online social networks, hy.pr drives traffic to the publisher’s website, increases brand awareness and lowers the cost of subscriber acquisition."

As reported by Folio Magazine, to use it publishers register with hy.pr, then create custom URLs for select articles and print them in the physical edition of the magazine. When the reader wants to share the article, they can then enter the URL into a web browser, which offers the reader a "share and save" page from which they can e-mail a shortened link directly to their contacts, bookmark the link or share it among social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Digg. Folio cites as an example, the French magazine Polka which includes the URL polka.hy.pr/punk which allows readers to then share pictures on social media sites.

According to Smub CEO Thierry Lamouline, "Our research shows that roughly 25% of all Tweets and Facebook status updates contain a link.  By empowering their readers to share content, publishers will create an audience of social media marketers who actively promote publishers brands, driving targeted traffic to publishers’ web sites, which in turn will dramatically lower the cost of a subscriber acquisition via the web."

Have a look at how marketing has dramatically changed over the last few years, and how a well planned direct marketing campaign can produce extremely good responses, profit and return on investment!