PRINT + DIGITAL Combining Print + Digital Marketing: The Field Guide Combining Print + Digital Marketing: The Field Guide Balance is hard. But in marketing, as in life, it’s crucial. People who can’t balance work and life get either burnt out or fired. Those who can’t find the middle ground between marketing fads and foundational platforms end up wasting their budget and watching their ROI plummet. CEOs and marketing managers are doing this right now with print and digital marketing. While some can’t muster the courage to take advantage of digital marketing platforms, others overcorrect in their rush to go all-digital. Two things happen when you find a balance between print and digital marketing: you improve the performance of both and you gain an advantage over every competitor who doesn’t have that balance. This field guide will explain why so many get it wrong, why it’s so important to get it right, how to make your print and digital marketing work together, what each medium is good at, what they’re not good at, how to run an effective direct mail and email campaign, how to develop print and digital at the same time, and more. We condensed all that into the following 5 sections: 1. Data not hype: Why so many get it wrong 2. Why print and digital work so well together 3. How to combine print and digital marketing 4. eCommerce Branding vs Physical Branding 5. Email Marketing + Direct Mail: The Marketing Alley-Oop There’s no time to waste. Let’s get to it. Combining Print + Digital Marketing: The Field Guide Page 2 Data not hype The Direct Marketing Association does a huge study each year, and each year the findings are a gold mine for savvy marketers. The 2016 study’s results were no different: • More than 100 million U.S. adults made a catalog purchase last year • 190% rise in direct mail response rates But how? How did marketers get such huge response rates and even *gasp* sales from a channel that had been pronounced dead over a decade ago? Well, for starters, they listened to data instead of clickbait. They leveraged this growing wealth of info to segment their mailing lists just like their email lists. Their multi-channel campaigns actually included physical and digital for a much greater array of touchpoints and better effectiveness of each thanks to higher recall rates. And they used the same insights their digital counterparts were using to create mailers that addressed where their prospects are in their buyer’s journey. They found a powerful balance between print and digital. And you should too. As your competition overcorrects in their wholesale rush from print to digital, your competitive advantage lies in the balance. Human nature is a funny thing. If you’ve ever seen the line stretching around the block on the day the latest iWhatever is launched, you know humans love novelty beyond reason. Countless books written by serious, pipe-smoking psychologists no doubt explain this in excruciating detail, but for our purposes, we just need to recognize this tendency: People love what’s new, tend to follow the herd, and almost always pursue our gut feelings beyond what’s rational. Case in point: The digital marketing gold rush. As digital marketing channels emerged, early adopters cashed in. Their success sent CMOs the world over scrambling to get their share. They went all in on digital and print was pronounced dead on the spot. Combining Print + Digital Marketing: The Field Guide Page 3 Why Print and Digital Work so Well Together Like a classic food pairing, print and digital complement each other by being different in exactly the right ways. Donuts are sweet while coffee is bitter. Fries are hot, salty and crispy, while ketchup is cold, tangy, and slightly sweet. Print is tangible and lasting while digital is pixels. Digital is perfect for action – you can buy in few clicks – while print is perfect for engaging the brain at a deeper level to deliver a complicated message. The Canadian neuromarketing firm TrueImpact recently did a massive study that found direct mail requires 21% less cognitive effort to process than digital media. This gives marketers a great way to take a user from totally unaware of your brand/ product/service to highly informed in a single touch. Now they’re ready for that targeted digital ad. Compare that with a digital-only approach where your ad is supposed to introduce your brand and get a user to take action in the same half second while try to actively avoid it? I’ll take the first approach, thank you. Use each medium for what it’s best at, create seamless handoffs between the two, and align both from the start of the campaign to the final sale and you’ve got a smarter process than a huge portion of your competitors. It turns out that the magic of combining print and digital, is isn’t magic at all, but logic, data, and knowing enough about human nature to counter it. Digital marketing is great and targeted ads are a really efficient way to get your message in front of a very specific crowd. But just because targeted ads are good doesn’t mean that direct mail is bad. These two don’t have to be rivals – Combining Print + Digital Marketing: The Field Guide Page 4 How To Combine Direct Mail and Targeted Ads First, let’s get some baseline definitions to work with. Direct Mail: A marketing method in which carefully targeted prospects (chosen on the basis of age, income, location, profession, buying pattern, etc.) are presented with custom tailored offers for goods or services via ordinary mail or email. Marketing firms usually ‘rent’ lists of prospects from mailing list compiling firms who maintain a large inventory of names and addresses of prospects, divided into hundreds of categories and subcategories. – BusinessDictionary Targeted Ads: A form of advertising where online advertisers can use sophisticated methods to target the most receptive audiences with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting. – Wikipedia Each have things they’re really good at and some things that they aren’t so suited for. Knowing the difference is crucial for any marketer who doesn’t like wasting money. Direct Mail – Pros • Highly targeted • Heightened sensory appeal (tactile, physical) • People absorb info 21% faster when it’s printed • Longer attention spans (online users experience more distractions) • More opportunity to deliver a larger, more complex message • Higher comprehension and better recall than digital ads • Greater emotional reactions than digital ads • More ventral striatum stimulation (area of the brain associated with desire) than digital media Direct Mail – Cons • Effective direct mail can be expensive to create and produce • Long lead times – digital ads can be seen instantly while mail takes days to get to recipients • Environmental impact • Acting on impulse takes longer than on a digital ad • Response rates are typically low (below 3.7%) Combining Print + Digital Marketing: The Field Guide Page 5 Targeted Ads – Pros • Instant access • Ability to convert desire to a sale in seconds • Highly customizable • Powerful personalization options • Ability to use video for highly attention-grabbing ads • Low cost • Low risk • Trackable – you can gather tons of info on every person who clicks your ad • Optimizable – improve your ad’s performance during it’s run based on data Targeted Ads – Cons • Very low attention spans • Ads shown to people who have already made their purchase and are out of the market • Too targeted can feel creepy (How do they know that about me?!) • Taking advantage of the ability to personalize drives costs higher • People share computers or devices can lead to faulty targeting (husband seeing ads for shoes his wife searched for) How can targeted digital ads and direct mail benefit each other? When your marketing mix lacks balance, you end up relying on a tactic to do something it’s not good at. Top-of-the-funnel Facebook ads for a product that requires a long explanation aren’t going to work. Instead, send a direct mail first that introduces your brand and breaks down your value prop and proves it through eye-popping stats. Then make that targeted ad look just like your mailer and continue the conversation. You can also leverage the data collected for your physical mailing list when you sit down to target your digital ads. That mailing list you bought with all those demographics doesn’t stop being applicable once the image becomes pixels. Did your mailer do well? Replicate the creative and targeting online. And vice versa. If you run an ad on Instagram that gets a ton of clicks, use that as the cover panel of a direct mailer where you can expand on the concept. When art and copy clicks, it’s a powerful thing. Don’t just run it once and shelve it. Combining Print + Digital Marketing: The Field Guide Page 6 Practical Takeaways: Direct Mail Tips Get specific: A broad message that tries to appeal to everyone is like trying to hammer in a nail sideways. Find your point and put your weight behind it. To do this, you need to first segment your audience so you can address each buyer persona’s needs and pain points specifically. Then segment by where they are in their buyer’s journey. If you just added them to your CRM you may have better luck pushing for a call with a sales rep than going right for the sale. If they’ve already had a call with a rep, your mailer needs to recap all the reasons they need to pull the trigger.