Frequently Asked Questions About Cross-Media Marketing

Targeted cross-media campaigns help grow your sales, improve your marketing, and strengthen relations with your customers.

Cross-media marketing couples personalized direct and email with personalized web microsites.

What is direct marketing?
This term describes any campaign that puts your offer directly into the hands of people you think might be interested in it. Typically, direct marketing has been done via direct mail, often supported by business reply cards or inbound telemarketing. Nowadays, direct mail may be supplemented with email marketing and web microsites.

Direct marketing can be contrasted with display and broadcast marketing, in which all readers, listeners or viewers receive the same message indiscriminately. Direct marketing campaigns can be numerically measured for effectiveness, something difficult to do with display and broadcast campaigns.

What are microsites?
Microsites are small websites customized for a single user that allow the user to respond to you on the Internet. They exist for the life of your campaign and for that purpose only.

When you include microsites in a campaign, your prospects log into them by keying or clicking on a domain address (or PURL), unique to your campaign, printed on their mail and email communications. This affords them a convenient alternative to phoning a call center, or filling out and mailing a business reply card.

What are PURLs?
Personal Universal Record Locators are the web addresses recipients use to access their microsites. As the name indicates, they are personalized for each recipient.

What do prospects see when they arrive at their microsites?
They first see a Welcome Page that includes your logo, your creative, and specific information about your offer, as well as a personal greeting highlighting their name.

What else is included in a typical microsite?
It can have up to four pages, including a:
• Welcome Page
• Survey Page (optional)
• Profile Confirmation Page (optional)
• Thank You Page

It may also include a Flash introduction. The Welcome Page and Thank You page may be versioned. The microsite set-up can also include a trigger follow-up Thank You email (optional).

What does versioned mean?
Versioning refers to customizing the content of a microsite page based on information about the visitor. For example, we can alter what appears on Thank You pages depending on how visitors answer questions on Survey pages.

What can microsites do for my direct marketing?
They’ve been called direct marketing’s “missing link,” because they:
• Quickly generate and qualify leads
• Gather information about the your prospects’ interests
• Adjust messaging and content on the fly for greater relevance
• Let you monitor campaign activity as it unfolds
• Immediately alert sales reps when there is activity on landing pages
• Help you learn more about your prospects so you can continuously improve your marketing communications

How do cross-media campaigns work?
They can work in many different ways. One example would be:
1. A direct mail piece invites your prospect to visit his or her microsite to learn more about your offer, product or service
2. A Survey page on the microsite requests information about your recipients’ interests
3. As this happens, your prospects contact data and answers to the Survey are sent to your follow-up representative
4. A Profile Confirmation page asks your prospect to confirm his contact information
5. A Thank You page presents a personal thank you message, and may also provide links to white papers, corporate websites and so on
6. Each step is carefully tracked by our system to assess campaign effectiveness
7. You monitor all this as it develops on your campaign dashboard

For greater security, can you add login codes to PURLS?
Yes, at your option.

Will cross-media campaigns support my sales team?
Yes. When prospects visit their microsites and fill in your survey they pre-qualifie themselves. This information, including the prospect’s answers to your survey questions, is immediately transferred to your representatives’ smart phones or computers for appropriate follow up.

What can I ask my prospects on the Survey Page?
Anything you want to.

What is a campaign dashboard?
A campaign dashboard is a viewer that shows you a real-time summary of the overall activity on your campaign microsites. You access your dashboard on a website we provide.

What is personalized or variable data printing?
Modern digital presses can vary the text, images, colors and layout of each and every print over the course of a press run. This allows you to design and tailor messages that are relevant to each of your prospects, and add individual PURLS to each piece.

How much customization can modern digital presses handle?
Conventional direct marketing mail pieces are typically customized only by varying names and addresses. Modern presses can vary everything on each piece, according to your goals and what you know about your prospects.

What do you mean when you say your campaigns are personal?
We strive to send each of your prospects information relevant to him or her as an individual, according to what you know about their interests.

What do you mean when you say your campaigns are interactive?
Like in a regular conversation, microsites let your prospects tell you more about what they want from you. What you learn allows you to treat them more personally in future interactions.

What do you mean when you say your campaigns are measurable?
One of the strengths of cross-media marketing is that you can track responses and compare the value you receive to the cost of your campaign.

What measures do you use to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns?
Cost per response is one measure. Return on investment is a better measure.

Will you help me calculate the return on investment of my campaigns?
Yes. Campaign follow-up analysis is part of our standard service.

Can you work with my existing collateral?
Yes. It is usually easy to add PURLs to your current designs.

How do you price your service?
We give you a fixed price for each campaign, based on the campaign development, execution, and management and review services you use. Campaign costs also vary with the size of your mail list, the number of mailings in your campaign, and the complexity of your mail pieces.

Does your fixed campaign price include postage?
No. We cannot compute postage until we presort your mailing list.

So how much does a typical campaign cost?
Cross-media campaigns typically run from around $2,500 to $12,000 depending on the development services you require, your mail piece complexity, the number of mailings in your campaign, and the size of your list.

Can a campaign include multiple mailings?
Yes. Multiple mailings make campaigns more effective. The cost of multiple mailings can be included in your fixed price, and their timing is completely flexible.

Can you do “trigger” campaigns?
Yes. We can send your prospects personal mail and email pieces triggered by events such as birthdays, when subscription or lease terms are about to lapse, or other relevant dates. We can send out such mailings individually, even one at a time.

Who uses this kind of marketing?
• Candidates for political office use it to survey voters and raise money
• Nonprofits and alumni associations use it to give people an easy way to donate online
• Automobile dealerships use it to promote weekend sales, end-of-lease programs and service specials
• Manufacturers use it to sell services and supplies, and to promote trade show traffic
• University admissions departments use it to promote applications and improve matriculation rates
• Professional organizations use it to promote seminar enrollment and attendance
• You can use it in many other ways limited only by your imagination!

More FAQ about document services

Frequently Asked Questions about Digital Printing

How good is the quality produced by black and white digital printers?

Nowadays it is as good as black and white offset printing.  Expect good solids and clear half tones.  Photos reproduce very well.  There is excellent print consistency across print runs.

How about digital color printers?

Although color quality varies somewhat depending on the brand of printer involved, you should expect excellent business quality color.  This means vibrant colors  and skin tones that are realistic and attractive.  Colors should be consistent across the sheet, across the run, and reproducible on future runs.

Can digital print shops produce complex products?

Yes.  Modern digital print shops can replicate most of the products you might expect from large commercial print shops, with the qualification that digital shops are set up to produce these product in smaller batches, and much faster.

Available services include single and double sided lamination, die cutting, corner rounding, perfect (paperback book) binding, assembly of kits, full direct mail services, display graphics and banners, and fulfillment.

Anything else?

Yes.  Digital print shops are particularly adept at producing personalized and versioned documents.

Digital machines can also print on an ever-growing range of substrates,  including magnetic stocks, films and window clings, and lots of kinds of labels.  Digital machines can print bar codes.

Can digital print shops help me find new ways to streamline my business and cut costs?

Yes, re-engineering how you manage documentation is one of their main strengths.

Digital printers can provide you advantages such as online ordering and proofing processes, short-run  on-demand (“as needed”) output to eliminate the cost and waste of storing pre-prints, online customization of business cards to cut administrative costs, and online tracking of digital inventories and print order histories.

Digital printers can also help you retain and find customers with targeted, personalized cross-media campaigns.