Part 3: The Core

Anatomy of an Integrated Multichannel Campaign

3. The Core: Use interactive direct marketing to help you track response.

When you’re communicating the same message and offer across several channels, the overlap of response methods and campaign data can make your head spin — and skew your results. Yet with a focused campaign, there are effective ways to funnel response and track results.

Use vanity URLs and SEO to help you track response from print.

“If your print piece is driving to online, you can measure ROI very effectively” using a custom URL, says Hastings. If your campaign is all about a new prepaid card you’re launching, drive traffic from your direct mail piece to a special URL such as BrandX.com/prepaid. “People will type in the ‘slash-whatever,’” Hastings says.

Still, she points out that no matter how compelling your print campaign is, the fact is that 80 percent of Web traffic starts with a search. That figure is even higher in business- to- business marketing. And search engine optimization of a multichannel campaign takes more than typing keywords into a field.

Use these SEO tactics to make sure people find your offer:

• Make your message/offer memorable enough to search for by keyword on Google, even if the consumer can’t find your direct mailer under a pile of bills, homework and competing direct mail. “The offer also has to be compelling enough that they will go online and give you their contact information,” Hastings says.   You can use this contact information to continue to market to your audience.
• Make sure your campaign is highlighted on your homepage, too, in case they come directly to your homepage.
• Follow the good SEO hygiene practices in our article "3 Keys to Successful Organic SEO".

Build landing pages to help you track referral sources and keywords.

“Lots of companies that buy pay-per-click (PPC) ads just link you to their homepage and don’t track what traffic was brought in from those ads,” says Hastings. “If you have a keyword-based ad with an offer, link it to a landing page that fulfills what the visitor was looking for. It will convert much more effectively.”

A landing page specific to your campaign lets you:

• Highlight your offer at center-stage and “pop” your call to action to boost conversion rates.
• Focus the page’s meta data on your target keywords associated with just that campaign.
• More clearly track referring sources specifically for that campaign.
• Funnel responses from every channel used in the campaign to the same page to simplify messaging and tracking logistics.
• Use A/B testing — for example, sending email subscribers to different versions of landing pages to see which one performs best.  Fusionbox often builds in a simple content management system behind the scenes of the landing page, so the client can make versioned landing pages on the fly to easily test offers, creative or messaging.

Hastings describes how one recent campaign using a PPC program to bring in donations used 10 different ads with different offers, keywords and landing pages. The results: Online donations grew by 1,000 percent, traffic jumped by 250 percent, and overall donations shot up 29 percent over the previous year. “And this was in the first year of the recession," she notes.

Use these tactics even if you're driving traffic to storefronts.

The importance of using all the tracking tactics above can hold true even if redeeming your offer requires people to come into a bricks-and-mortar location.

“For, one client, we run a PPC campaign around keywords like ‘own your own gym’ and link those to a landing page that’s very specific,” says Hastings. “We’re able to track all the way down to whether they buy a franchise.” She explains that the landing page includes a form that collects contact information along with the referring source, so our client can see where a person clicked to get to that page. It also records the keywords that person searched for. The form feeds into a database, so campaign performance can be tracked very quickly and easily.

Since the campaign launched, our client has had 1,200 new leads come through the PPC ads. “And they can market to those leads in the future,” Hastings points out.

Try reversing the polarity of digital and print.

Rael says the conventional model of using digital channels to track response from a print channel can be turned on its head very effectively, too.

“Usually you go out and cast a net, then market to people who react,” he observes. Print is often used heavily in the net-casting stage. But some brands are also using interactive to get people more involved with their brand, track how engaged they become and market to them accordingly in the print channel — reserving its higher per-piece costs for customers who bring the ROI to make it work hardest.

Rael’s team recently went to websites for household-name lifestyle brands like Harley Davidson, Heineken, Johnny Walker and Volvo. “I just signed up to be a Harley Davidson member,” he explains. “I didn’t pay anything, but I got their cool updated enews every month, then I kept going back and visiting the site. The more I visited, the more I’d get high-gloss direct mail packages, like a package with a story about Heineken.”

This is a more sophisticated and forward-thinking way to use print together with interactive. “The more they interact, the more engagement they show with the brand, the higher their lifetime value for your company,” Rael points out. “It’s about tiered involvement and correlating tiered investment of marketing dollars.”

Ready to integrate? Call Sandi McCann at Heinrich Marketing for a personal consultation on your marketing goals and how an integrated multi channel marketing campaign can deliver on those goals.

Part 1: The Brains: Leverage the strengths of each channel.

Part 2: The Heart: Keep branding consistent across channels.


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