If I knew then what I know now in cross-channel marketing

I’d like to introduce myself.  I am Mark Gottlieb, marketing director of COF/ Control-o-fax, a Waterloo, Iowa based business specializing in printing, marketing, and office supplies.  I never thought of Iowa as a place for cutting edge marketing until I joined COF…boy was I wrong!  
 

In the beginning of my career, when I wanted to market to customers/prospects, I would use my housefile of customers and prospects and would rent outside lists for snail mailings.  The creative pieces often incorporated limited personalization.  As time went on, personalization capabilities became more sophisticated, and beginning in the 1990s, e-mail started to gain traction in marketing campaigns.  I will never forget the day when all the pieces in terms of the list, creative, and offer fell into place on a large campaign that I had to convince my employer to send and it had a huge ROI with a 2% purchase rate.  If I knew then what I know now about cross-channel marketing, perhaps I could have had a 6% purchase rate with a small incremental increase in the campaign cost! 

Cross Media Marketing Made Easy to Maximize ROI

This leads me to tell you about a new cross-media, variable data one-to-one marketing service COF now has which provides solutions to help businesses create and manage highly-effective direct marketing and cross-media campaigns.  It utilizes software that allows businesses to uniquely leverage customer information to achieve dramatic returns on their marketing investments.  This service consists of a powerful cross-media marketing solution spanning print, web, e-mail and mobile communications, web-to-print software for e-commerce-enabled storefronts and marketing analytics for the tracking, analysis and refinement of live campaigns.

Today’s preferred channels for communication have created new consumer behaviors. Effective marketers are using print and new media to effectively reach their customers with targeted, one-to-one communications. Offering cross media communications allows you to expand your business and capitalize on this growing market.  Implementing cross-media campaigns allows you to reach consumers across print and digital media channels with consistent messages that are most relevant to each individual recipient -- in content, presentation, timeliness and channel.  Our new cross-channel marketing service allows you to create campaigns that are state-of-the-art for each media channel – in design, content, interactivity and data-integrity – guaranteeing highly-consistent messaging and branding across all channels in the media mix.

Image Personalization Stands Out and Drives More Sales

I remember how much of a lift in purchase rates I received when I started using personalization in my direct mail and e-mail campaigns.  I would have loved to have been able to add image personalization in my email marketing but was never able to do so.  Now we can enable our customers to create personalized images with ease utilizing Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator.  We make it simple to have variable text and/or graphics change per recipient, and have each unique image seamlessly integrate into an InDesign layout in the print stream.  The fascinating combination of personalized images with digital printing consistently evokes an emotional reaction from the targeted audience. It is now easy to create and offer unique and memorable personalized materials.  Imagine you are a college fundraiser who could now add yearbook college photos and a photo of your college when your alumni attended and today to your direct mail or on a personalized url to each recipient.

The best part about being at COF besides the friendly, knowledgeable staff is the ability to offer variable printing along with the services shown above.  I keep thinking what can we do to top this, and at COF, I’m sure we will.