I’m a fan of Gary Vaynerchuk – he’s a bit of a ‘marmite’ marketing/sales/social media/personal brand influencer of the moment.
If you cut through some of the needless self-publicity, a lot of what he says really makes sense, just by being common sense.
One of the main tenets in his vlog, is that marketing is all about day-trading the attention of the audience – wherever their eyes are going, that is where your message needs to be. That is all well and good, but what happens if their eyes are going to a platform or channel, already saturated with marketing messages, many of which are poor, irrelevant, or even bordering on the illegal? What happens if that channel is email marketing, your trusty marketing water-carrier for the last 5 years?
Recently a number of our progressive clients have been really investing in highly personalised and segmented direct online mail campaigns. Yes, email is cheap. Yes, mail is more expensive. But, flip that around – how many millennials even use email these days? And if they do, how many emails are received and deleted straight away?
Rather than using direct mail as the kick-off point of a campaign for general brand awareness, savvy marketing teams are using data-driven DM to help nudge prospects along the applicant cycle, and then to convert them. One well-crafted, highly personalised direct mail piece on the doormat costs much more than a generic email; but if it leads to one more enrolment, it is good money, spent very well – and it is likely to still be much cheaper than your CPC on any AdWords campaign…
