Today’s modern marketer is focused on an omni-channel strategy. Several brands have reached a plateau with their online marketing channels and are embracing the ‘love for print’.
Our clients are using print for new customer acquisition, customer retention, customer reactivation, along with cross-selling amongst brands for those clients that have multi-brand portfolios. They have also used print to drive demand online or to drive in-store traffic.
Let’s explore some benefits of adding print to your marketing strategy:
Print creates visuals that stand out in a crowd
Print creates an experience that is visually appealing to the eye. Seeing (along with giving, receiving and handling) tangible objects remains a deep and intuitive part of the human experience. Our clients often share with us that print enables them to get more personal with their marketing programs helping to create a 1:You.
The catalogue browsing experience is a positive one. In fact, consumers spend 15.5 minutes looking at a catalogue and keep it on their coffee tables for several weeks. And, 72% of consumers shared that catalogues make them more interested in a retailer’s products while 84% make a purchase after seeing an item in a catalogue.
Why?
Because consumers view direct mail as a proactive component of their buyer journey encouraging them to either make a purchase or learn more about the product’s benefits in another channel.
Print Drives new demand
Print as a channel creates additional demand for your products and services. It’s a channel that educates the consumer on the benefits of these products and services and influences them to further explore your brand in online or mobile channels.
Think of print as an experience. With today’s advanced technologies, marketers have innovated the catalogue experience by integrating AR (augmented reality) with their catalogues by adding quick response (QR) codes that activate mobile phone cameras and trigger a ‘digital twin’ of the product. This digital replication is life-like and allows the consumer to preview features they’d see in-store.
For example, the home design brand Houzz leverages AR within their catalogue. Consumers who use Houzz’s AR technology are 11x more likely to purchase and 2.7x times more engaged, meaning they stayed on the site longer. So how did Houzz achieve success? By following a four-step process: They discovered the story they wanted to augment, identified the emotions they wanted to generate, created a storyboard of the ideal experience and integrated the AR technology to implement the vision.
Print Increases ROI
Print is an expensive marketing channel when compared to others currently available; however, clients continue to see the value and increase in ROI from leveraging the direct mail channel.
The average return on investment for Direct Mail is £3.22 from each £1 spent compared with online’s £3.12 for every £1 spent. When integrated with other advertising channels, direct mail becomes even more powerful. According to BrandScience research, the online component of campaigns pays back 62% more and the TV component pays back 37% more when there is direct mail in the mix. On average, direct mail pushes up return on investment from £2.81 to £3.40 for every £1 spent.
At the end of the day, any emerging marketing channel due to technology will disrupt print, however print will remain an important channel for many of our clients based on the value it brings to their brand and the uplift it can bring when integrated with digital channels.
So how can you get started?
Create a roadmap for building out the print channel and test each component including targeting, offer, sale, creative and growth potential. And always keep front and centre the three pillars of print success – offer, audience and creative.
And remember, PRINT ISN’T DEAD – IT’S DEAD SEXY!