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“We need more leads!”

In economic times both good and bad, the call for adding more leads to the sales pipeline echoes in offices across the globe.

If it’s your responsibility to help attract new prospects, there are many tactics that can be used. However, with limited time and budgets, you may be challenged on how to successfully choose and execute marketing activities across certain channels.

Well, we have compiled a list of campaign ideas that could help your company generate awareness, and add qualified leads to your prospect database. In this month’s issue, we’ll share one of them…

Direct Mail, EMail, and the Web

There is no “OR” in that heading! Combining print and electronic channels in your marketing efforts is a proven method to increasing the success of your marketing campaigns.  In fact, InfoTrends recently produced a study with some hard numbers on this. Here’s what they said:

“According to a new multi-client study from InfoTrends entitled Multi-Channel Communications Measurement and Benchmarking, marketers report an average improvement of 35% for multi-channel campaigns (using print, e-mail, and Web landing pages) over single channel print-only campaigns.”

Source: http://www.infotrends.com/public/Content/Press/2009/01.09.2009.html

While using multiple channels in a marketing effort may increase the time needed on your part, it does not need to be hard. In fact,  you want to use similar creative on your print piece, email, and landing page. The messaging and call to action on the different channels should be consistent.

Thus, you need to think of your target audience… come up with content and creative… and then create your direct mail piece, email, and landing page. Once you have those assets ready, it’s time to execute. Here is a sample campaign idea for targeting your prospects across multiple channels, multiple times:

Week 1:

• Direct Mail #1 – PURL drives people to landing page
• Email #1 – 3 days after mailing drops, email is sent with link to landing page

Week 2:

• Direct Mail #2 to non-responders – General URL drives people to landing page

Week 3:

• Direct Mail #3 to non-responders – PURL drives people to landing page
• Email #2 – to non-responders, with varying creative: a video?

But more than that, you can also combine multiple channels by using auto-responders.  For example, let’s say someone responds to the PURL from the direct mail piece. On the landing page, they answer a few questions regarding what they’re interested in.

Well, as soon as they hit Submit, an email could be automatically sent to that individual (this can be done easily with the right marketing software system). The email may thank them, and also provide links to PDFs related specifically to what they expressed interest in.

Yes, in a scenario such as this, you are reaching out to people multiple times and across multiple channels.

Sure, some people may opt out. But that will happen in any marketing effort.

Overall though with this approach, you will greatly increase your chances of converting these people from targets into members of your prospect database.