Craig Huey knows it sounds downright ludicrous to suggest that retailers could ever undervalue foot traffic to their stores. But for years, says Huey, president of Creative Direct Marketing Group in Torrance, Calif., that’s exactly what happened.
When e-commerce emerged as a hot sales medium in the mid- and late 1990s, Huey says, many retailers became so enamored of the Web that they began to focus less on driving people into their actual stores. Instead, he recalls, pushing consumers onto Web sites – even at the cost of losing focus on foot traffic – became all the rage.
No more.
While marketers certainly do continue to increase their Web presence, a growing number of brands have also begun to reemphasize the importance of foot traffic – and, in a twist, they are now using the Web to boost in-store and in-office activity. And in so doing, these companies – which include retailers, financial institutions and others – are also finding that direct mail is one of the most effective catalysts for translating Web traffic into foot traffic.
“There’s a revolution going on today in retail marketing,” says Huey. “Direct mail is driving retail marketing.”
For years now, brands have used direct marketing to drive online business. Now, many of them are using direct to push consumers onto the Web, yes, but then into the actual stores.
“We’ve seen a definite turn,” says Karen Dobbs, a senior vice president at marketing agency Epsilon. She notes also that where many businesses were often content to coax consumers onto their Web sites for transactions, they are growing more focused than at any time before in the digital age on increasing business at their shops.
Many of Epsilon’s clients are large financial service companies that, in recent years, have also grown more concerned with increasing activity at their local branches, she says. In many cases, direct mail is their channel of choice, often used as part of a broader media mix that places emphasis on the Web, too.
“Web sites are a wonderful tool and enhancer of customer experience,” Dobbs says. But she adds that many companies now realize that attracting customers to their shops may be a surer way to build relationships and to differentiate a brand through customer service. Studies also show that customers are more inclined to make other types of purchases, notably impulse buys, when they are in-store rather than online.
Given this, many businesses see direct mail as the key to achieving particular types of sales objectives even when the hurdles to these goals vary by industry.
For instance, KeyBank’s Commercial Banking group – which advises owners and managers of midsize companies – mailed a high-tech mechanical toy called “Robosapien” along with a personalized letter and business card introducing their Key banker to target lists of prospects.
To operate the electronic toy, recipients needed a remote control device, which could be obtained when an appointment was set up. The letter noted that appointments could be arranged either by the executives calling the banker, or via a follow-up call they would receive from that individual.
The response was easy to track, too, because the response mechanism was built into the offer itself: Everyone who made an appointment to receive the remote control was responding to the Robosapien mailing.
