Power Up With Multichannel Marketing

If you’re relying primarily on one kind of marketing to bring in most of your customers, you could be selling your business short. The most successful marketers today use multiple channels, according to the DMA 2015 Response Rate Report. Nearly half (44 percent) of survey respondents use three or more marketing channels in their marketing campaigns; nearly two-thirds (65 percent) use two or more.

The survey asked marketers about seven key marketing channels: mobile, email, online display, paid search, telephone and direct mail). Here are the key insights:

Email Is Number One

Email is the most popular tactic overall; some 83 percent of respondents use it in their marketing campaigns. In fact, for the 35 percent of respondents who only use one marketing channel, it’s most often email.

Mobile Has the Most Potential

Not many marketers use mobile marketing yet (just 10 percent do), but almost three-fourths (73 percent) say they plan to use it more in the next 12 months. Those who do use mobile marketing tend to be multichannel-marketing savvy—65 percent of mobile marketing users use at least five marketing channels in their campaigns.

Social Media Is Still Growing

Social media is far from saturated—almost two-thirds (64 percent) of respondents plan to use it more in the next 12 months, putting it second only to mobile media in growth potential. No wonder—its cost per acquisition is among the lowest of all the marketing methods surveyed. In addition, 34 percent of marketers use social media ads.

What’s not hot? Direct mail is on the decline. Nearly eight in 10 companies used it in 2012; now, only half do.

What’s the takeaway from the study?

• Don’t settle for just one marketing method. It’s easy to integrate your marketing across multiple channels without much extra effort. For instance, expand your email marketing by including links to social media accounts and vice versa. Use print ads to drive viewers to your website or social media pages (where they’ll find a call to action, of course!).
• Get in on the ground floor by experimenting with mobile marketing now. Start small by making your emails and business website mobile-friendly—these will have big payoffs. Next, explore the options for marketing with ads in mobile apps or by sending text messages to customers who opt in to receive them. With just 10 percent of marketers currently using mobile marketing, it doesn’t take a lot in the way of mobile marketing to put you ahead of the crowd.
• If you’re already using social media marketing, good for you! Now try experimenting with new social media channels and/or paid social ads.

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash