Ruth P. Stevens Articles and Columns: IM Press (Interactive Marketing Press)

August 2007 — Integrating Online With Offline Marketing

As Internet marketing grows, adding richness and complexity to the marketing communications mix, U.S. marketers are struggling with how to integrate their online programs — email, banner advertising, search engine marketing (SEM) — with their traditional offline marketing activity, whether it be television advertising, direct mail, event marketing, or any other channel.

The benefits of integration are obvious, at least in theory. Each communications "touch" builds on the other, delivering a consistent brand message to customers over time. Without a coordinated effort, marketing messages will not work as hard, and may even, in many cases, conflict with each other, destroying brand value.

But it isn't easy to organize all this coordination, for two reasons. First, Internet marketing is still in its relative infancy, and often set up in a start-up "skunk works" kind of environment. This might mean a 20-something employee charged with managing keyword bidding sits in one corner, while the website is controlled by the IT department, and email campaigns are outsourced to a service provider. Even so-called integrated communications agencies are organized by channel, with email and web departments sitting separately from advertising.

Many observers believe this problem will go away over time, as Internet marketing matures, and is folded into standard marketing processes. But the other reason is more insidious. It has to do with the way marketing communications operates as a whole. Namely, in an ongoing jumble of miscellaneous campaigns intended to meet certain short-term marketing objectives.

Consider a common scenerio: Corporate communications wants to build brand awareness via television, while brand marketers try to launch a new product, and sales teams strive to meet quarterly revenue quotas. Campaign managers determine what communications media will be most effective for each of these goals — and away they go, running campaigns here and there to drive business. The customer receives uncoordinated messages from all parts of the company, on behalf of multiple products, diluting the impact of the whole.

What Is To Be Done?

At this point, U.S. companies are approaching the problem of integration from two prespectives. The simplest, and most common, is at the campaign level, where a series of touches through multiple channels are designed to work together. Marketers have long known that combining touches improves results. That's why direct marketers follow up mail with a phone call, and why general advertisers coordinate print and broadcast messages to work together.

In its 2005 study on multiple channel use, The DMA found that more than half of respondents said they used at least 10 communications and sales channels, the leaders being the website (93%), email (90%), catalog (87%), SEM (83%), and direct mail (77%).

New Tools For Integration

Some useful new tools are now available to coordinate campaign touches online and offline. For example, the USPS offers direct mail tracking through a technique called PLANET coding. Mailers can buy preprinted bar codes on pressure-sensitive labels, and affix them to their outer envelopes. As the mail moves through postal sorters at various locations, the USPS scans the codes and sends the data to Trackmymail.com, where it is posted on the Web in real-time reports that marketers can access easily. By tracking the mail to its destination, marketers can accurately send an email at the perfect time to coordinate with the mail's arrival — whether the email is designed as a pre-announcement of the mail piece, or a post-mail email follow-up.

Integration within Internet campaigns can also be a challenge. For example, today marketers tend to use different analytic tools to asses the effectiveness of their email, versus their banner ads, versus their SEM campaigns. It can be a nightmare trying to track a campaign through various online channels. To address this problem, Web analytics companies are rushing to provide integrated analytic tools. Omniture recently introduced Genesis, which grabs up data feeds from your banner ad serving company, your email tracking system, and your optimization tools, and delivers a one-stop view of multi-touch campaign results.

The Ultimate Solution

In the long run, the ideal solution to the integration problem, whether it be online or offline or both, is to organize marketing communications at the customer level. As long as companies are set up by product silos, this ideal will remain out of reach. But some companies — financial services begin the pioneers — are recognizing the value of an integrated customer contact strategy.

An example is offered by Vernon Tirey, SVP of Click Tactics, an integrated marketing firm that helped Bank of America develop an "on-boarding" strategy for new customers who opend direct deposit accounts. BofA's objective was to coordinate all messages to these new customers as effectively as possible. So Click Tactics set up a series of triggered communications responding to the account opening (a welcome letter), then encouraged activation, up-sold overdraft protection and bill payment services, and cemented the relationship.

With luck, and persistence, integrated communications across Internet and offline channels will continue to evolve in a direction that supports efficiency and brand value.

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