Direct Mail: Top Channel for Some of America's Best Known Companies
Direct Mail
Findings from a recent client survey performed by SourceLink, a top 5 largest CRM/Direct Marketing Agency and top 3 GPO Supplier, revealed direct mail to be a top marketing priority for 2012.
The findings of SourceLink's latest Client Marketing and Transactional Document Survey are based on completed surveys from over 30% of SourceLink's client base. The firm’s client list includes Disneyland, Bank of America, BMW, Lowe’s, Nestle, the U.S. Social Security Administration, Time Warner Cable, and more.
Key client objectives for 2012 were customer retention, ranked number one in the survey, followed closely by customer acquisition and customer profitability. Nearly nine of 10 respondents declared direct marketing as the medium best equipped for reaching their marketing objectives.
Key findings include:
- Direct mail ranked number one (88%) planned marketing channels for 2012, followed by web/micro-site, email, and social media. Two-thirds (64%) of respondents use social media as part of their marketing plan.
- Recognizing the role of modeling and analytics in accomplishing marketing objectives, over 60% of respondents assert that they currently leverage customer intelligence or are interested in doing so in 2012.
- Recognizing the imperative of multichannel efforts, over 69% of respondents conduct multichannel marketing and over 56% of those consider it an integral part of their marketing strategy. However, only 34% are seeing the results they had hoped for, highlighting the need for a centralized, database approach to optimize multichannel communications.
- Over 45% of respondents have considered integrating marketing with transactional customer documents, and over 40% use color personalization in marketing communications or transactional documents.
- In tandem with the focus on direct marketing, 80% of all survey participants cited business intelligence/data driven marketing and campaign performance/marketing metrics as "Most Important," "Very Important" or "Important" for 2012.
Source: Printing Impressions, SourceLink Client Survey Finds Direct Mail Is Still the Top Marketing Channel, March 22, 2012 and SourceLink, SourceLink’s Multichannel Survey Shows 64% of Respondents use Social Media as Part of Their Marketing Strategy, March 22, 2012.
