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7 Cost-Cutting Tips For a Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy

Blueshift

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In view of recent events, businesses ponder how to get the most out of their existing marketing channels and strategies. 69% of brands expect to cut their advertising budgets and review expenses. 49% of marketers have stopped a campaign mid-flight, 45% shifted budgets among different media types, and 38% decided to pause their new advertising efforts.

Although such drastic measures may be reasonable, they don’t necessarily have to undermine the overall effectiveness of the multi-channel marketing strategy. You can make your marketing approaches work despite cutting costs.

Treat the economic decline as a good chance to learn more about your business and optimize it. The right changes will help you go through the crisis with minimum losses. Moreover, a polished multi-channel marketing strategy will continue to boost your sales in the long run.

We believe that data-driven prognosis, flexibility, analysis, and automation are the pillars of cost-effective marketing. To learn how to use them in practice, discover 7 ways to reduce expenses without ruining your multi-channel marketing strategy. You will also find out more about multi-channel mail automation with Inkit + Blueshift for direct mail.

7 WAYS TO SLASH SPENDING ON MULTI-CHANNEL MARKETING STRATEGY BUT KEEP IT WORKING

It’s worth noting that most of these steps to a greater or lesser extent are based on marketing software. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since over 51% of companies are already using marketing automation, while 58% plan to adopt it. Although optimization has always been one of the key martech powers, today, marketing software is critical to spend less.

#1. PAY MORE ATTENTION TO ANALYTICS AND DATA-DRIVEN MARKETING

In order to understand where you currently are and what to do next, you need to analyze metrics. Aggregate data on customer behavior to get a bird’s eye view on your multi-channel marketing strategy. This will help you learn what efforts & activities pay off and what does not work for your business.  As a result, you will shift money from fruitless channels to optimize conversion rates across those touchpoints that work. Data-driven marketing also helps with advanced personalization and targeting since you can build the most realistic customer portrait. The better you know your customer, the more chances you have to make them stay despite budget cuts.

#2. DON’T IGNORE THE OFFLINE WORLD

When the whole world goes online, the temptation to pour all your marketing budget in digital advertising is huge. Nevertheless, it’s better to leave some of the offline channels intact. Most probably, you have already saved the money otherwise spent on trade shows, business trips, and other offline activities. Consequently, these expenses will no longer drain your budget. To continue communicating with your customers offline, you can use mail marketing. Direct mail has a 10 times higher response rate than emails, paid search, and social media. Therefore, it’s a great way to make your voice heard among millions of online ads and engage new leads.

#3. TARGET ONLY THE CUSTOMERS THAT ARE LIKELY TO CONVERT

Businesses waste a lot on nurturing customers that never convert. Despite visiting your online store, clicking ads, and following social media, such leads don’t buy anything. To stop spending money on unpromising leads without harming your multi-channel marketing strategy, you need to conduct lead scoring. Luckily, Blueshift’s Predictive Intelligence can do this for you. The tool automatically determines customers’ likelihood to take a specific action (engage, churn, purchase, etc.) and changes their score correspondingly. Thanks to this, you can stop investing in leads that won’t convert.

#4. SYNCHRONIZE YOUR ONLINE AND OFFLINE TOUCHPOINTS (DIRECT MAIL + ONLINE MARKETING)

The customer journey directly impacts your income and marketing achievements. It was found that consumers are ready to pay 16% more if a customer experience meets their expectations. Even though sales growth doesn’t reduce expenses, your budget and marketing opportunities grow. Besides, if you already have a multi-channel marketing strategy, building a smooth customer journey is simple. The main task is to connect online and offline touchpoints into a logical sequence of customer interactions. By combining direct mail, online marketing, and social media within a single multi-channel marketing strategy, you can tailor your next communications based on the previous interactions across other channels. Such personalization and flexibility are essential for a seamless customer experience.

#5. BOOST YOUR MULTI-CHANNEL MARKETING STRATEGY WITH A/B TESTING

Once you’ve made some changes to optimize the existing multi-channel marketing strategy, make sure they were right. Testing is required to estimate which of your solutions has the highest ROI. You can use the tools with built-in A/B testing like Blueshift for running test marketing campaigns targeted at small audiences. The obtained preliminary data should help you estimate the results before starting a full-fledged campaign. Split testing is also useful to know whether the changes in your current multi-channel marketing strategy are worth the cost.

#6. ALIGN SALES AND MARKETING TEAMS

The use of direct mail, online ads, content, and all other marketing means usually aims at sales and/or customer loyalty. Therefore, you must never separate your marketing team and sales specialists. “Smarketing” (the combination of sales+marketing) means that everyone who interacts with consumers should convey the same message. To achieve this goal, you need to make all customer data available within one system with modern CDP software. As a result, both teams will always stay on the same page. You will stop wasting money on managing two separate departments and achieve a stronger focus on sales.

#7. UTILIZE AI-POWERED MARKETING AND MARKETING AUTOMATION

As we have already mentioned, marketing software is crucial for running cost-effective campaigns. Still, there is a significant difference between basic martech tools and advanced automation solutions. Consider switching to the services that support AI-powered marketing and fully automate the customer journey. The research shows that AI solutions helped 44% of companies improve their marketing experience, 40.8% increased the speed of campaign execution, and 39% achieved incremental revenue growth. For an affordable monthly or yearly fee, you get access to broad automation, analytics, and testing capabilities. This gives you additional time and human resources you are free to manage based on your business needs.

HOW INKIT + BLUESHIFT DIRECT MAIL AUTOMATION CAN BRING DIRECT MAIL ONLINE

If you want to synchronize mail marketing with online actions, you need to take direct mail online. Is that really possible? Yes, with the combination of Inkit + Blueshift, direct mail can become highly digitalized. For example, you will be able to automatically send a greeting postcard when a user subscribes to your services or tie mailings to any other action recorded online. Such a multi-channel marketing strategy will make you stand out from competitors. Moreover, you will only mail the people who are likely to convert without investing in bulk printing and random delivery. It’s a proven cost-cutting approach.

To bring direct mail online with Inkit + Blueshift direct mail, follow 3 simple steps:

  • Step #1 to launch a mail campaign directly from Blueshift
    • Connect Inkit and Blueshift though the webhook
  • Step #2
    • Open Inkit to upload the design of a mailpiece and configure the campaign
  • Step #3
    • Go to Blueshift and include the mail marketing campaign in the marketing workflow