Читать книгу Social Media Marketing For Dummies - Shiv Singh - Страница 22

Direct mail is about managing an active customer database and marketing to members of that database via circulars, catalogs, credit card applications, and other merchandising materials delivered to homes and businesses. You’ve probably gotten a lot of direct mail over the years — perhaps mountains of it — and at some point, you’ve probably wished that these companies would stop mailing you. That’s all direct mail, and whether you like it or not, direct mail has been a very successful form of marketing. The catalog industry has logged billions of dollars in sales because of it.

However, that has been impacted by social media marketing. Of all the areas of marketing, direct mail is one that will be most affected in the long run. Before you start worrying that your mail carrier will stuff your mailbox (or your email inbox through e-mail marketing) even more than usual, consider this: Direct mail is most successful when the mail is targeted and personalized. That means it’s reaching the people who really care about the offers (or are most likely to take advantage of them), and it’s personalized toward the recipients’ needs in a voice and style that’s appealing to them. Pretty straightforward, isn’t it?

Direct mail is as successful as the marketer’s customer database. The database should contain names and addresses of people who are open to receiving direct mail. But when people stop trusting the marketing efforts of large corporations and instead switch to each other for advice, that’s when direct mail loses its power. Statistically, we know that consumers are now more likely to depend on each other for advice and information than they are on the corporations that are marketing to them.

With consumers who are even more connected to each other through social media than before, it has gotten easier for them to reach out to one another for that advice. That means that when they see a piece of direct mail, they’re less likely to depend on it. They’d rather go online and ask a friend for advice or search for a product online than look at that flyer in the mail. And as marketers harness social media marketing tactics more, it could see further drops.

There’s another side to the story, though. The more data that you can capture about your customers through social media marketing tactics, the more opportunities you have to feed your direct mail database. That’s just a factor of consumers doing more online, sharing more of themselves, and opting into direct mail efforts in exchange for information or acceptance into an online community. Your database may get richer with social media marketing in the mix, but the value of it may decrease — although that doesn’t mean that you can’t use direct mail as a starting point to jump-start an online community, sustain interest in it, or reward participation through mailing coupons. The solution? Think about how you collect information about your consumers differently and, more important, how you share information back to them. It doesn’t have to only be via mail or only via social media; knowing when to use what form of communication is key. More on this in later chapters.