5 Tips for a Successful Marriage Between Your Offline and Online Channels

In my first two posts, I talked about how underrated offline marketing is and what the most effective offline channels to provide unique customer experiences are. Now, I’m going to close out the series with my tips on how to plan a perfect marriage between your offline and online channels.

We’ve established the impressive value of offline marketing. Now, let’s talk about how to integrate offline to make a major impact to your marketing efforts. Here are my top tips on how to do so:

1. Rely on a complete 360° customer view and deliver personalized and contextual messages from a single platform

Example: As a marketer, your mission is simple; avoid delays and access in real time the last status ━ last actions, last communication sent, etc. ━ of your customer. To be successful, you need to have an Integrated Customer Profile. Then, leverage the data you have to deliver personalized messages to boost the response even further. According to DMA, adding simply a person’s name and full color in the direct mail can increase response rates by 135 percent.

2. Make sure you integrate your offline with your online channels in a single platform so you can consistently manage your customer journey

Do not just think of your marketing/messages in separate channels, but instead consider how each customer will perceive all of your messages from the company as a whole.

Example: If someone calls the Customer Care department at a cosmetic brand saying they’re allergic to a cream they bought, and the brand is using a single platform across the organization, they have a 360° customer vision. All the departments of this company will have access to this information. It means that when the marketing department will plan an email campaign, for example, this customer won’t receive a message to promote the cream he just bought. He will receive another message instead because this brand is paying attention to its customers. This enables the brand to stay close to their customers.

3. Leverage the data coming from a preference center

Example: Leverage the data from your preference center. Ask your customers which channels they prefer to receive your communications from, and respect what they want, whether it is online or offline channels.

4. Be agile — test and track your results, and adapt your methods when needed

Example: If you test your campaign on a small batch of 20,000 people and find that it’s not working, simply stop it. Or, if it is working in some ways, change those things ━ wrong wording, images, layout etc. Agility and flexibility will always be the key to your success.

5. Be creative. It’s easy to be traditional, but how can you make your direct mail, phone call or in-store experience unique and wonderful for your customers?

Example: If you use direct mail, it’s easy to make it basic. But, can you make it beautiful, something that your customers really would love to see and receive? Ask yourselves what would you like to receive. Go out of the box, be surprising! Don’t be afraid to be bold; humans have an attention span of 8 seconds. Marketing that cuts through the clutter with attention-getting graphics and copies are paramount to success.

So, when it’s time for you to think how you might integrate offline channels in the customer experiences you are providing, I suggest thinking about how you work today. Put your feet in your customer’s shoes and think about how you could leverage offline channels to differentiate your messages from those coming from your competitors. Interested in learning more?

Head over to the Adobe Campaign page and let us know how we can help.