Marketers are always looking for good tips on how to make their programs more effective, get more ROI, develop better relationships with their customers, etc. Here at Kirk, we have developed some tips that we would like to pass on to our blog followers – they will be up at random intervals, so make sure you check back often!

Here we go…Direct Marketing Tip #34:

#34. Think Multi-Channel

Thinking multi-channel means doing two things:

1) Making sure that your message is consistent within all your advertising, and

2) Using more than a single channel as part of your campaign.

Let’s break each of these down a little further…

Making sure that your message is consistent within all your advertising is critical to maintaining your brand image – mixed messages gives your consumers mixed messages about your brand. It helps cut down on market confusion for customers who may be seeing your marketing messages across a variety of media. In addition, it can help you better manage your marketing plans internally – helping you make sure that you don’t have conflicting offers running at the same time. Anything that is going to help you cut out confusion about your brand is a benefit in the long run and increases brand recognition and loyalty.

Using more than a single channel as part of your campaigns can help you to connect with a variety of consumers with different affinities towards different marketing media. For example, email in particular works very well when combined with direct mail and almost always increases response rates. Why? Because you are putting in the effort to communicate with your customers in their preferred media. Using multiple channels can also help reduce costs – by allowing your customers to opt in to only the marketing that they WANT to receive, you can cut down substantially on the costs of communicating with them in more expensive media.

So remember to Think Multi-Channel…because who wants to watch the same channel all the time?