Sir Speedy Centennial

In marketing 101, we learn that a potential customer does not recognize your message until they’ve heard it at least three times. That’s an important number to you as you design a campaign. Whenever possible a marketing event should be three-pronged. Today you have lots of media to choose from: email, web, PR, social media, print, and more. Understanding search-engine optimization (SEO), viral and social marketing, and other online positioning can help you to successfully impress your message upon your customer in a myriad of ways.

In most cases print costs more to produce than electronic campaigns, but not always. Factor in the hosting costs, click-thru tracking, banner ads, traffic fees, web designers, and the lot, and you might well spend more on the electronic messaging that the old standby print job, but let’s imagine a budget split in thirds: one third to the email message, one third to the matching landing pages, banner ads, and statistical analysis, and one third to print. The print portion might be a printed postcard or brochure that goes out at campaign launch or it could be a loyalty piece such as a gift card that closes the campaign and provides that goodwill seal.

Understanding the possibilities of electronic campaigns and embracing those possibilities might very well be the key to many new opportunities for you. Partnering with Sir Speedy Centennial will help you understand the vast possibilities and is a great way to get started.

By way of example, let’s take a look at a customer-loyalty campaign. (You participate in a customer-loyalty campaign every time you use your grocery store discount card and they reward you by immediately spitting out discount coupons on the very products you just purchased.) Our theoretical campaign has three components: a variable-data email, variable-data web pages (also known as PURLs), and a direct-mail postcard. (You know the rules: they need to see it three times.)

For this campaign, we will create three versions of the email and postcard. Each has the same message (visit our web site and complete a short survey on your buying habits) and both are sent to the same customers. Each version has a different reward: one is a simple thank you, one a coffee-shop gift card, and the last, a discount coupon at our store. The intent here is to try to determine what type of gift would actually drive the customer to the site and compel them to complete a survey.

At the end of this campaign we should have a stack of completed surveys. Taking a close look at these surveys will give us the analytics (response rates). We can collect all sorts of data: what type of customer visited the site, what offer prompted them to take action, and whether email or print prompts them to act. These types of results can be enlightening — to say the least.

If you think that electronic campaigns aren’t as successful as print, then you weren’t paying close attention to the presidential campaign. Viral/social marketing was pouring out of our computer monitors, but it was well matched with other marketing types. By the time the election came around, I had enough door hangers to start my own paper mill. This is a stellar example of a really successful multi-touch campaign.

Click here and Sir Speedy Centennial will get you on the right path today.