Businesses who wish to maximize ROI need to understand the dynamics of today’s marketing environment. Today, the most successful marketing is accomplished by a shrewd integration of online and offline marketing. The more traditional methods of direct mail and mailing lists play a key role.
But the smart marketer must also grasp the importance of brand loyalty because even with the best integrated marketing strategy, existing customers can drift away unless you keep them focused on your brand.
Brand Loyalty
The key to a successful marriage of online and offline marketing is brand loyalty. It is a well known fact that it costs more to acquire new customers than it does to make repeat sales to existing customers. Once you have a new customer it is vital that you keep that customer for repeat sales.
The amount of a small business marketing budget spent on repeat sales is far less than the amount spent acquiring a new customers. Therefore, it is important to keep your customers’ attention on your brand in a sea of competing brands that can snatch him or her away the next time her or she is ready to buy your product or service.
Two Kinds of Mailing Lists
In this scenario, the business marketer will be working with two kinds of mailing lists – the online mailing list and the offline mailing list. Your direct mail piece uses an address list and drives the customer either to an online store or website or to a traditional brick-and-mortar store. These are sent out periodically and are coordinated with discount items or store sales. Then you follow up with periodic mailings using an email list with a discount coupon to drive your customer back for repeat sales. Then you repeat the process over and over.
The danger comes when customers return to their original source to find you all over again from scratch. It can happen with an online source like a search engine or an offline source like the Yellow Pages. For example, it is possible that you acquire your customers using search engine marketing or Google ads to and you fail to establish brand recognition with the customers.
These are expensive marketing channels and if the customers don’t remember who they did business with or your brand wasn’t meaningful in some way to help them remember you, then they will go back to Google instead of to your business the next time they want to buy. Somehow, in that marketing scenario, the whole thing went awry and the customer thinks, “I was successful in finding what I wanted in Google” instead of “I was successful in finding what I wanted at ABC company.” Your brand failed to impinge.
Direct Mail That Reinforces Your Brand
You have to put a direct mail piece into your customers’ hands that reinforces your brand before they are ready to buy again. Your brand has to connect with them in some way to motivate them to return to your store or website. The have to recognize and prefer your brand over the myriad of other brands competing for your business.
Brand recognition has to be part of an overall marketing strategy that uses mailing lists for traditional offline direct mail marketing and it works best when integrated with a website or online store using email marketing with an email list plus social media.
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