Integrating on and offline marketing to maximise ROI

Integrated marketing campaigns have a long and impressive history of delivering bigger returns for the same level of investment. Single message propositions running across print, direct mail, DRTV and other channels have been proven to uplift response.

Like many marketing principles, this could be considered common sense. Looking at marketing campaigns for the likes of John Lewis, More Than, and Churchill Insurance for instance, it is very clear how the brand proposition and recognisable consistent campaign messages help these brands promote their individual USP.

Publishers have also got good at this, despite budgets that are usually relatively limited. For example, the Economist’s iconic brand messages translate very effectively into strong subscription calls to action. Another great example of this is publishers’ Christmas campaigns, where most publishers use a single message and consistent creative. Over time, tests at different publishers have proven that this is the best way to deliver maximum return on investment.

So far, so good. However, one area where the integrated marketing principle has not been so universally applied is integrating on and offline marketing.

In some cases, this is a direct result of businesses adding in digital knowledge and expertise via separate and new teams who are working to different KPIs to the rest of the business. In other cases, publishers have been slow to benefit from the digital opportunity because their skills base is very much offline and there is a struggle to get up to speed in today’s time pressured workplace.

For those of you who have already got your success formulae carefully calibrated and optimised, you need read no further. But for those who are keen to get more benefit from the integrated approach, read on for some information on how you can optimise your ROI.

Direct Mail and email

One of the first quick wins for the integrated on and offline approach is planning your direct mail and email activity so that they complement each other to maximise response.

This can be as simple as sending an email teaser or follow-up message to every direct mail campaign. The messaging can be extremely straight forward – a quick précis of what your recipient should look out for in the forthcoming post. Or a more complicated message involving more sophisticated creative. Editorial hooks can work incredibly well here. No hard sell, just a taster of what your publication has to offer to whet your prospect’s appetite. If your publication is news related or topical, this is a great chance to make your email campaign bang up to date with reference to that week’s hottest news story.

This approach also lends itself to fashion magazines (want to keep up to date with the latest catwalk looks) or specialist interests (what you should be doing in the garden this week).

The great thing about the email teaser is that it is simply a way of engaging interest and warming up your prospect file. You can then stick to your tried and tested direct mail pack and avoid the sometimes difficult editorial discussions about the need to update on a campaign by campaign basis, instead using editorial input to help create a really effective email teaser.

The email follow-up can be even simpler, creatively similar to your direct mail pack, reminding your prospect that they need to act now in order to benefit from the offer that you’ve made them.

The stronger the offer, the more likely you are to see a positive response to this follow up. The psychology behind this targeting aims at those people who might have thought about subscribing but simply didn’t get round to it. The great benefit of email is embedding a quick and easy online subscription link, which allows them to sign up there and then, with no delays. For business models that allow free trials or bill-me offers, where no payment is taken at the point of application, response rates to this type of activity can be impressively high.

Should you do all three? Teaser, mailing and follow up? It depends in many ways on how warm your prospect list is and the timing of your campaign. A suggested timing might look similar to this:

Week 1 – Look out for our offer – email teaser
Week 2 – Mailing drops
Week 4 – Don’t miss out – email follow up

For a very well targeted prospect pool, where I know I can be confident the proposition is of interest, and I haven’t cast the net too wide, I would be happy to target the same individual three times in a month. I would, however, be nervous of prompting too many unsubscribes, depressing my database of email permissions. If I were targeting internal data which had a different profile to my core prospect pool, I would think again about the number of contacts they received. In either case, I would monitor unsubscribe rates very carefully to make sure they stayed very low.

Equally, with the warmer prospects where I’ve chosen to contact them three times over the course of the month, I would carefully flag the non-responders and ensure they weren’t contacted again for at least six months or so.

The beauty of today’s database marketing technology is that I can opt individuals in and out of the three campaigns to tailor what they receive based on my marketing segmentation. I don’t have to do separate campaigns; I can just amend the content based on my knowledge of the prospect pool and use data-driven solutions to run this.

This gives a high level of accountability. If you A/B split your data and test the combinations of direct mail alone versus direct mail with one or two emails, you will be able to robustly quantify your uplift and fully demonstrate the success of your strategy to the rest of the business.

Online activity – portfolio and individual title campaigns

So, having integrated your one-to-one marketing campaigns to your prospect file, what comes next?

I would suggest that you look at integrating your seasonal marketing campaigns with online activity. For the consumer publisher these might be, Christmas, January sales, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day using traditional media such as off-the-page, carrier sheets, direct mail and telemarketing.

Taking the creative that you use for your offline portfolio campaigns and re-versioning it to work as online banners, buttons and editorial promotions, will give you a great return for not too much investment.

These can also be provided to any affiliates you use, or third party websites with whom you have a relationship.

Ensuring that your offers are consistent is important, as this will reinforce your message. The consumer may see your offers in a number of different places before finally making the decision to go ahead and subscribe.

This approach also works very well for promoting solus offers for individual titles. Someone who reads a magazine and sees an offer, may well have felt tempted but the phone rang and they forgot all about subscribing.

If there is a good overlap between your online audience and your print readers, you may well find that you get more response by running the same offer on your website as you run in title. Of course, this can and should be tested to find the best formula for each brand.

There is sometimes a downside if a publisher runs attractive introductory offers which lead to higher pricing after the introductory period has ended. Offline, you have more opportunity to control offers that your subscribers are exposed to, by, for instance, plate changing page ads in subscriber copies, doing separate runs of inserts with different offers for newsstand and subscription copies (usually focusing on cross-sell / up-sell for the later), and suppressing active subscribers from your acquisition campaigns.

Online, unless you are a publisher who has made registration mandatory, with registrants giving you enough detail to allow you to match back to the print edition subscription file, and the ability to serve your ads depending on who is looking at the page, your offers will be transparent to the existing subscriber.

On the whole, though, the uplift from new subscribers acquired should more than compensate for any renewal impact on your existing subscribers.

Integrating search engine marketing

Making the most of search engine marketing (SEO and PPC) in an integrated way makes a lot of sense. It is sensible to make sure that your search terms and associated copy carry a consistent message with your offline campaigns. For example, "A magazine subscription makes a great gift all year round."

This applies to magazine websites which act as promotional vehicles for print magazines and also for subscription fulfilment sites where publishers or third parties cross-sell magazines.

For individual titles, making sure that your offer is consistent in copy for natural and paid search, for example ‘3 for £1’ or ‘save 30%’, can help minimise the amount of clicking around your prospect will do, in search of a better price. The less clicks to order, the more likely the prospect will complete and not fall out of the online sales funnel.

The benefits of the integrated approach

In summary, there are a number of tangible benefits to taking an integrated approach to on and offline marketing.

* Keeping brand values consistent.
* Integrated creative will boost your message and maximise cut-through.
* Seasonal campaigns in particular will get a big boost from this type of approach.
* You gain more opportunities to test and ensure that you are getting your targeting correct.
* You can evaluate performance of the different marketing channels on a like-for-like basis.
* You benefit from a halo effect in terms of the overall awareness of your campaign and your key messages.
* You get a bigger overall ROI on the same investment.