We have been sending flyers, inserts and catalogs to our customers for years. It?s one of the few tangible means of getting our customers to interact with our brands. With mobile saturating the market, our customer habits are changing and our marketing methodologies have not necessarily kept pace with the change. When it comes to print marketing, what we really want to know is if our efforts are working, when it makes the most sense to invest in print materials, and what mobile techniques we can use to drive the best results.
Below we examine different challenges marketers face when using direct mail as a marketing tool and how Rich Media Messaging (RMM), the next generation multimedia messaging technology, provides an alternative solution to engage consumers for direct marketing campaigns delivering immediate and cost effective results.
High Cost
Consider that the average cost per acquisition using direct mail is $51.40 (Direct Marketing Association, 2012) and it continues to get more expensive over time as the overall response rates keep declining. Now, with the introduction of Rich Media Messaging, it is possible to deliver robust image, video and long text based content to 96% of your customers at standard messaging rates and increase your response rates to drive down cost. RMM enables marketers to leverage consumer behavior as almost all Americans now own a cell phone and keep them within arm?s reach 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This permits us to push the relevant message via mobile to a broad base of customers, track results, and decrease costs to a less than a dollar per acquisition.
Low Response Rates
Direct mail response rates have dropped approximately 25% over the past nine years (DMA, 2012). Current direct mail response rates are hovering at 3.4%. Additionally, it is not possible to track the number of customers who actually read the materials when using direct mail. Rich Media Messaging is a new and innovative technology that is leveraging new consumer behaviors via mobile to communicate more effectively with your consumers. With a well thought out plan that focuses on delivering value to customers, marketers can use Rich Media Messaging to deliver images, video and long text directly to their customer handsets and obtain open rates of close to 97%, 90% of which are opened within the first 3 minutes (Frost & Sullivan, 2011). Actual data shows that redemption rates for RMM hover on average at 30%, which can truly redefine the expectations and results of your marketing program.
Long Delivery Cycle
When using direct mail, it often takes marketers several weeks to design, print and deliver the materials to the customer. With the introduction of digital and mobile tools, it has become increasingly important to have real time conversations with our customers. When using RMM it is now possible to identify immediate opportunities and react to them within days instead of weeks. Using this approach gives us a legitimate advantage when dealing with our customers and our competitors. Consider the case where your inventory levels surge on a specific product, using RMM it takes a few days to design and deploy the campaign vs. delivering the same campaign via direct mail.
RMM provides us with a low cost, immediate direct marketing solution that delivers higher response rates than direct mail. As our customer habits evolve, it is important to understand how we can leverage the same innovative solutions to drive results and surpass our expectations as marketers on what we can hope to achieve. RMM is a proven technology that can amplify our tool kits and truly impact how we view direct marketing and our possible results.
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