How are you incorporating integrated marketing in your marketing program? This Integrated Marketing Checklist covers strategies you should consider for customer acquisition.
Top Strategies in Integrated Marketing
- Search marketing. This is when a prospect uses Google to search on your company name or product. A paid search ad should pop up and direct them to your website or landing page.
- Retargeting. Re-targeting occurs after a prospect interacts with content on a media site or searches on a specific term. A sequence of follow-up ads, known as re-targeting ads, shows up as they visit other sites. Many people refer to this as “stalking” a prospect. For example, if you’ve ever clicked on an ad for shoes on-line, you will see other ads for shoes every time you open up your Facebook.
- Welcome strategy. When a prospect subscribes to an email newsletter or calls into the office to ask about a service, you should have a welcome strategy in place. This might include using a sequence of email, direct mail and follow up phone calls. This will allow you to start to develop rapport. You now have an opportunity to educate the customer about your brand or product. Bottom line, you are looking to generate a sale and you have to start somewhere.
- Following up on customer interest. When a customer clicks on a link in an email or interacts repeatedly with content on a site, do you have a way to interact with them? Is there an automated workflow that triggers email, direct mail or a phone reminder about what they were looking at?
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- Reducing online attrition. Not everyone ends up buying. When a shopper abandons their shopping cart, you need to have a combination of communications to win them back. For example, someone who was looking at auto insurance policies on-line and dropped off should get a follow-up email to remind them about the benefits of taking out the policy with a link to going back in.
- Getting the frequency right. It’s important that messages stay relevant and don’t become intrusive. Nothing gets people angrier than too many emails cluttering up their inboxes. You need to create rules. Decide the maximum number of emails you want to sent in a given period (one a month or one a week) and the interval between them (for example, at least 3 days).
- Getting the channel right. This means using the best channel(s) for the customer. The channels need to fit their preferences. It also needs to be the right channel(s) for your company. You want to find the best combination of cost and response. It means that for some customers you focus on email communications because they interact and respond to them. But other customers may absolutely not respond to email. That means direct mail may be the best choice to communicate with them.
- Getting the offer right. Offers will vary in effectiveness according to the target audience and the media channel. A direct mail offer may be way different than an on-line offer. Test different offers that deliver the right message and make someone want to respond.
Thank you to digital strategist Dr. Dave Chaffey, co-founder and content director of Smart Insights. I adapted some of his checklist for my own.