OK, so you've got a great quote on a print job and want to send out a direct-mail campaign. Well, whether it's a business-to-business or a business-to-consumer mailing, you're going to want to give some thought to developing online components that work with your printed piece.
Websites, and especially e-commerce sites are great places to drive recipients to. Websites offer customers more layers of information about a product or service and can help businesses gain more information about sales-leads using internet forms. Some business-to-consumer companies who integrate their mailings really well with their websites are eBay and Netflix. No surprise there, they're both extremely savvy, web-based businesses. On the business-to-business side, both Xerox and American Express OPEN do a great job of pushing recipients from a mailing to a website. Below are some tips for using your postcards or direct mailing and website together to create a multichannel marketing effort: 1. Create a dedicated landing page Don't just drive recipients to your www.homepage.com, which probably acts as a welcome page for your company and has very generalized information on it. Instead, create a dedicated URL, i.e. www.homepage.com/specialoffer and print this address on the direct-mail piece. You can populate a landing page with offer-specific content and really drive home the sales pitch. 2. Include a digital coupon Coupons have been a direct-mail stronghold for decades. In fact, it could be argued that the ubiquitous Bed Bath & Beyond 20 percent off coupon may have been responsible for the downfall of its competitor, Linens 'n Things. If you have an e-commerce site, then send folks a promotion code in the mail that they can then use to gain a certain discount online. Design a physical coupon insert for the mailing that people can easily leave near their computers for reference. On the coupon, be sure to include the URL, the discount code and repeat the offer, for example, 20 percent off. 3. Look to the web for creative and copy When you drive customers from a direct mailer to your website, you don't want them to wonder why the special offer landing page looks like it belongs to a different company than the rest of the site. When designing a direct-mail campaign with an online component, it may be more practical to work from the design and copy online and create the printed piece around the website design. That will keep all of the logos, tag lines, fonts and branding consistent from print to web.
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