Multi-Channel Marketing That Works

We know that multichannel marketing works. Success builds on success, so as we head into a new marketing year, let’s draw inspiration from recent campaigns that have worked and take a hard look at why.

SunGard’s Zombie Apocalypse

Let’s start with SunGard, which was tasked with a seemingly impossible challenge: make business continuity, managed services, and production resiliency interesting. How do you make the dull seem fascinating? Tap the zombie culture. Ultimately, the campaign, which combined email, direct mail and social media, won a MarketingSherpa award.

How did it work? SunGard targeted individuals at the director-level or above employed by companies with $50 million in assets. SunGard also retargeted those companies that had dropped off the radar.

The campaign kicked off with email. The goal was to get recipients to download two digital assets related to SunGard’s services using the zombie theme. The first was a digital manual about surviving “the zombie apocalypse” focused on SunGard's business continuity disaster recovery services. The second focused on migrating to the cloud and how that aligns with surviving the zombie apocalypse. The call to action was to get recipients to a landing page where they could enter to win a physical "zombie survival kit."

The next step? Follow up with direct mail. With the volume of direct mail declining, SunGard knew that a creative piece would get noticed. The first mailer included a flash drive featuring a message from "a guy in a bunker" about the zombie apocalypse and letting recipients know to expect another direct mail piece in the form of a backpack with survival necessities. The second was the backpack with promotional materials, two tickets to see "World War Z," silly string ("zombie repellant"), and other apocalypse survival materials.

To multiply the message, SunGard encouraged recipients to share and get engaged on social media. The team ran Facebook and LinkedIn campaigns in which SunGard gave away 25 of the zombie apocalypse survival kits.

The results?

• The "IT Availability Cloud" email campaign achieved 1.2 percent higher click-to-open (CTO) among director level recipients. Among recipients in global, large and medium enterprises, the CTO was above average.
• The "Disaster Recovery/Managed Recovery Program" campaign created a three percent increase in CTO among president or owner titles.
• The retargeting email reactivated 2% of contacts who had not interacted with SunGard within the previous six months.

The Standard Group’s Crazy Christmas

We don’t usually think of printers’ self-promotions as inspiring, but The Standard Group’s multichannel campaign is worth talking about — and its customers still were talking about it six months later. The campaign has brought in tons of inquiries, motivated new customers to do their own personalized multichannel campaigns, and opened its employees’ eyes about the full scale of its capabilities. Imagine hearing your own employees say, “I didn’t know we did that!”

The theme of the six-day campaign was “Countdown to the Holidays,” and it tapped direct mail, QR Code, online video, email, personalized landing pages, social sharing, and follow-up personalized gifts.

The campaign kicked off with a direct mail piece featuring TSG headquarters interpreted as a gingerbread house. Each door or window was to be opened on a specific day leading up to the holidays. When the door was opened, recipients were invited to log into his or her personalized microsite to view a TSG-created video or order a personalized gift.

TSG used complex programming that only allowed for the ordering of gifts on the designated days. If recipients tried to order early, they got a message from Santa telling them they were being naughty.

Recipients could log into their personalized URLs by hand or by scanning a personalized QR Code. They were also sent emails each day to remind them to log in. If recipients liked what they saw, they could share it out on social media.

The mailer was personalized for three experiences: TSG customers and prospects, TSI customers and prospects (TSI is a sister promotions company), and TSG and TSI employees.

Employees in all departments were involved by either being a part of the strategy and programming, in print production and assembly, by contributing family recipes and holiday songs, or by participating in the holiday video. For the video, TSG wrote and produced a parody of "All About that Bass" called "All About That Print." (Hint: It’s worth watching.) TSG did 99% of the work internally.

The project was “quite sticky,” according to Thanh Nguyen, CMO for the Standard Group. “Customers told us they diligently counted down with us by only opening the advent calendar on the day of.” Since imitation is the greatest form of flatter, Nguyen was happy to report several customers asking TSG to create similar for them next year.

To watch the TSG team sing “All About that Print,” click here: PrintingNews.com/12150565.

Testing the Timing Between Emails and Direct Mail

Not all multichannel campaigns need to be so complex. The simple email/direct mail combination remains the most accessible type of multichannel communication. But should the email precede or follow the direct mail piece? That’s where we’re seeing a lot of experimentation. The answer will differ depending on the goals of the campaign.

The client of one marketing services agency wanted to test which timing would be most effective when sending an announcement email—prior to or after the arrival of a direct mail package.
Working with Pitney Bowes, the agency developed an approach that triggered emails based on expected and actual in-home arrival dates. For emails sent before the package arrived, the agency needed to know when the package was expected to arrive. For emails sent after arrival, it needed to know the date the package was actually delivered.

Pitney Bowes’ TrackMyMail services team helped to apply different identifiers to individual records, project in-home arrival dates, and track arrivals at specific addresses. The team also set up an automated daily feed of tracked data back to the agency, with each item classified by its timing. The end result was that the agency could easily see which time interval worked the best.
The program provided the agency’s client with “extremely valuable” information on how to proceed with combination direct mail/email campaigns. The end client used the testing to change its best practices for multi-channel campaigns using direct mail and email communications.

For this campaign, Pitney Bowes didn’t post the results. But earlier this year, EarthColor released results of a similar campaign in which its telecom customer found that, once customers enter a store or the website, if it sent out an immediate email and, within 24 hours, followed up with a printed offer, this creates the best opportunity for a sale.

But sometimes the timing doesn’t have to be so precise. C.Trac, a marketing firm in Strongsville, OH, worked with one client to promote a seminar. It started with a “Save the Date” direct mail invitation, then sent a follow-up email three to seven days later. It sent a second email two weeks later. Finally, prospects received a “final call” direct mail. Notable to the client was that it was the final mailing that generated the most responses. People had put it off and finally registered.

The campaign got a 41 percent response rate, with a 50 percent increase in reservations over the prior year. ROI on the final mailing was over 300 percent.

Real Mail Notification (RMN)

If you haven’t heard about it, the next “generation” of email vs. direct mail timing is coming from the USPS. Since USPS sorting machines already take pictures of the fronts of nearly every piece of letter mail in order to read their barcodes, in fall 2015, U.S. Postal Service introducing the New York market to Real Mail Notification (RMN), an email preview of what's in people's mailboxes. Subscribers to the service receive morning emails with pictures of the fronts of pieces that will be sitting in their mailboxes that evening. Certain pieces are clickable, allowing recipients to respond even before the mail arrives.

Multichannel marketing is getting exciting. Stay tuned!