Programmatic multichannel approach to marketing should be adopted
Digitally-savvy millennials are proving to be very receptive to receiving direct mail from retailers, particularly when it is part of a multichannelled communication delivered by the brand.
This surprising finding comes from Andrew Adkins, managing director of GI Insight, who says: “Millennials are responding favourably to direct mail as they are relatively unfamiliar with the channel. It’s novel to them.”
It is most effective when used as part of a programmatic driven multi-channel strategy, which is uniquely offered through GI Insights’ Campaign product, according to Adkins, who says the company has both the personalised direct mail capability as well and the technology for undertaking complex analytics on retailers’ online stores.
This involves monitoring customers’ behaviour online and when they lapse from browsing on a retailers’ site or they abandon their basket then CAMPAIGN automatically triggers a re-targeting message through direct mail, email, SMS or through a social media channel.
“Say a customer has abandoned a pair of jeans in the shopping cart, we can take the image of the item and create a highly personalised piece of mail that includes the product and price, and could also include a discount offer, which can then be delivered to the customer’s letterbox within 48 hours” explains Adkins.
He says it is a unique solution is proving attractive to retailers because it is delivering strong response rates unlike the majority of digital communications, which is a channel that has been adopted by many retailers while they have all but abandoned traditional direct mail.
JD Williams has been using the programmatic CAMPAIGN solution and enjoying some success: “They were seeing only modest response rates to email-only cart abandonment mail-outs but when they overlaid it with direct mail the response rates increased significantly to 14%.”
In the same way that retail thinking is coalescing towards multi-channel as being recognised as the best model to operate Adkins says the same should also be seen with marketing.
“Through CAMPAIGN we can achieve a truly joined-up view for retailers. We can now see the direct link between browsing online and the purchases customers subsequently make in-store (using loyalty programmes as the customer identifier). With this we can understand who does not need to be re-targeted by direct mail. Lots of retailers do not have this joined-up approach, it’s very powerful,” he says.
There is also the capability to drive the re-targeted mail-outs in real-time by continually selecting groups of individuals based on specific characteristics, which could be geo-demographics or previous buying behaviour. This flexibility also allows for A/B testing and real time attribution reporting.
Visit GI Insight’t website to watch a short CAMPAIGN explainer video.
Email marketing@gi-insight.com, for more details of how you can benefit from a programmatic approach to marketing.
