Killer Online and Offline Marketing For Ecommerce

At the moment online marketing is cool, hip and still the buzz word of every upwardly mobile marketing manager.  Offline marketing is still there and works very well.

You should be doing both.

The longer standing companies we work with know the power of offline marketing and continue doing what they have always done with direct mail.  It is the younger companies who overlook offline marketing.

You may think it is odd for a ‘digital marketer’ to talk about offline, but when you have the stats sitting infront of you there is no denying that when online and offline work together they are greater than the sum of their parts.

With direct mail it is still easier to reach most prospects and when the campaign is backed up by online marketing the results are impressive.  If a prospect receives a catalogue and then an email a day later these two messages reinforce each other and give better results than they would have done separatly and combined.

Of course this makes it hard to track the sucess of online marketing directly as if the email is enough to tip the buyer into ringing up for a product in the brochure that they see when offline then this is not tracked online.  To only way to notice the difference is when you look at the statistics before and after the implemention of online marketing.

Just starting to do email marketing properly in sync with your brochure send out with the key messages reinforced will really sky rocket your brochure conversion.  This is why email deliverability is key for mail order companies as it is paramount that the brochures key messages get strengthened by repeat exposure.

How have you found online and offline marketing working together?

Thank You

Mark Hammersley