Pitney Bowes and driving web traffic
Added: 27/08/2010 Reporter: Pitney Bowes
The growing importance of online sales has led many marketers into the dangerous assumption that web traffic and e-commerce is best driven by advertising across electronic channels - email, sponsored links, banner adverts, social network advertising, and so on. Gareth Stoten, general manager of Pitney Bowes DMT UK, explains more.
However, research by Pitney Bowes has found that marketers will benefit from implementing a balanced marketing plan, particularly when seeking to communicate with prospects rather than existing customers.
The notion of online marketing can appear seductively attractive. It appears to be low-cost, fully
accountable, and pay-as-you-go. Of course, more experienced marketers also recognise that online marketing has a far less consistent underlay of available data and intelligence on the consumer, and reliably reaches only a relatively small proportion of the prospect audience.
Direct email is a powerful way of communicating with existing customers, but very much the junior partner when trying to reach and influence prospects. Out of 10,000 adults surveyed, of the older age groups only 11% had bought as a result of email prospecting in the last year. Two thirds (62%) of European consumers said that traditional direct marketing and direct mail were the most effective channels for encouraging website visits. In contrast, only 24% of European consumers felt the same way about the power of new media advertising – sponsored links, prospecting emails, Facebook adverts, etc – to encourage serious website visits.
Actively putting a commercial offer in front of the consumer – especially a prospective customer rather than an existing one – is often more effective, acceptable and non-intrusive delivered through offline media (such as direct mail) than online. Direct mail has a higher cost per impact than above-the-line advertising, but allows discrete, targeted audiences to be reached with a more individualised message, encouraging proportionately higher response rates. It may also be the case that advances in colour
personalisation technology in the last few years, combined with a falling price point for truly personalised mailing packs, has raised the bar and increased consumer satisfaction with direct mail personalisation.
This improved targeting of direct mail has certainly helped to reduce overall mailing volumes, and that can only be because return on investment for direct mail has improved as a result of that targeting. No marketing director would accept diminishing performance from their campaigns.
These are by no means findings which should steer marketers away from direct email prospecting. The medium is valuable and does work with particular niches. At the same time, it should evidently not be the recipient of a large proportion of the current marketing budget.
All in all, the will, the ability, the tools and the cost of personalising direct mail have reached an axis where it is acting efficiently as the premier means of driving web traffic with a serious intent to purchase. However, each segment of the population will require a different balance of communications channels, between mail, email, web, phone, text and face-to-face. Marketers seeking to throw out traditional media in a bid to slash their media budgets are teetering on the brink of a precipice. Clever practitioners are harnessing and understanding how to make channels work in combination to put their customer and prospect propositions head and shoulders above their competition.
