Marrying Print & Digital Marketing
Royal Mail - The combined power of print & digital marketing
A recent promotional campaign by The Royal Mail caught my eye. As it seemed really relevant to me, I decided to follow it through. And guess what? - I actually ended up using one of their new services!
This proves the point about innovating your products and services and making your marketing relevant to your customers by helping them solve real problems and frustrations. Not just ‘here we are, this is what we do, our processes are great - take it or leave it’.
The Royal Mail created an integrated campaign utilising conventional printed direct mail, combined with interactive online web based methods.
Before we get down to the nuts and bolts of the campaign itself, it has to be said that first of all The Royal Mail has been extremely innovative with its products and services by creating packages of these services that they know will help their business customers. This obviously shows great knowledge and understanding of their target market in the first instance.
These ‘packaged’ services were then themed around everyday issues that small business face e.g:
- Finding new customers
- Keeping the ones you’ve got
- Delivering your customers’ orders
So, issues that The Royal Mail knew would be relevant to businesses and that prospects would want to know more about.
The Campaign Unfolds…
Clever Direct Mail
The printed direct mail pieces were targeted to named prospects. And what forward looking business person could pass up the offer who of a ‘free business solutions pack’ especially when it was promised in 30 minutes?
The direct mail pieces also seemed to be split tested. Two different people in our business each received one of the above mailers. Each mailer pointed prospects to different web landing pages where they could initiate the orders for the free info’ packs. A great way to measure responses.
The creative was simple, but effective and the one with the coffee beans on the front even utilised the latest in printing techniques with an embedded smell of coffee - who could resist that?
The Landing Page
The landing page took you through a very simple and quick form filling process so the report could be personalised for your own business. I could see that some may not been too keen disclosing some of the information, but hey, if it meant you stood a chance of improving your business why not? None of the info was really sensitive in any way.
Lo and behold about 30 minutes later I received my report as a PDF. It was pretty much a boilerplated brochure that would have been sent to everyone, but included information that I had filled in on the website form, so in a way personalised.
As with most of these types of reports, I put it to one side to read later, which I was prompted to do a few days later when I received a printed copy in the post, with a bag of free coffee. It was then that I thumbed through the brochure and actually read about some of The Royal Mails new services.
I decided to take a look at their ‘mailshotonline’ service, where I was offered the opportunity take a free ‘test drive’ which I did and it worked. And I have subsequently used the service for my own mailing programme.
The Royal Mail example proves that marketing is more than just sending out a leaflet about what you do. It requires rigorous thought, it needs to be ‘joined-up’ and it requires persistance in order to pay off.
Andy Vickery
Blazon Creative Marketing http://www.blazon.co.uk
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