As CMOs search for better ways to target prospects and personalize campaigns, one Florida company has developed what it likens to the marketing equivalent of a heat-seeking missile — an online tool that sends direct mail to the growing army of Twitter users. Billed as “real PRINTED mail that connects to your online world,” the mailers include images and personalized messages to senders about their tweets and also contain codes and links to personalized online content.

Companies such as Box.net, Duct Tape Marketing and RealEstate.com have already flocked to the mailers created by Tampa-based enthusem as part of their outreach efforts. Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch, widely regarded as a marketing-industry influencer, described the integrated program as “the best of what offline and online communications has to offer.” The founder and CEO of enthusem, Steve Tingiris, forecasts that his company will have as many as 50,000 active users by the end of 2009.

In an online exclusive, Deliver recently talked with Tingiris about blending Twitter and other social networks with direct mail and the future implications of increased multi-channel interactivity.

DELIVER: What was the inspiration behind enthusem?
TINGIRIS: We imagined enthusem as a tool for sales and business development people to use for prospecting and sales follow-up. As smart as the online technology was getting, the people receiving the messages were getting smarter, too. They were becoming increasingly burdened by messages. Think about how many messages in your inbox are unread — it could be hundreds if you include e-mail, text messages, Twitter-direct messages, Twitter replies and Facebook messages. With this volume of messaging going out, there’s no way that we marketers are going to see the response rates we need.

So rather than create a tool that would allow you to get in front of 10,000 people and get 10 or 11 responses, what if there was a tool that would get you in front of 10 to 100 people for the same value you would get from 10,000? So we began sending messages via direct mail to people saying, ‘Hey, we’re following you on Twitter.’ They got a kick out of that.

DELIVER: Describe the nuts and bolts of the enthusem process.
TINGIRIS: We’re not a printer. We aggregate the orders and do all the prepress stuff here. Any user can upload any picture they want to print on the front of the card. The 8.5″ x 5.5″ folded cards then go out in a vellum envelope, so the picture that’s on the front of the card shows through. We impose all of the individual orders into one rip-ready file for the digital presses. Then our system is linked into a few vendors that we distribute the jobs to.

DELIVER: How does enthusem know where to send the cards? If I’m following someone on Twitter, they don’t necessarily have my address.
TINGIRIS: When we follow someone on Twitter, we view their Twitter profile first, which usually contains a link to their Web site. From the Web site we get their postal address. Currently this is a manual process, but we’re working on a semi-automated approach that will help minimize a lot of the manual work in getting postal addresses appended to the Twitter ID.

DELIVER: What has response been like?
TINGIRIS: The response rates to the cards are off the charts. I think in the past couple of months we’ve had 3,000 to 4,000 users sign up. Across all the users, we’re seeing response rates that are more than 17 percent. So when somebody sends a card and attaches it to an online file, 17 percent of those recipients are actually going online and typing in the code to get that information.

DELIVER: How is the combination of direct mail and Twitter enhancing interactivity between offline and online?
TINGIRIS: I think if you’re really going to make a social connection, at some point the connection needs to go offline, or it’s just not social. Finding an elegant way to transition from electronic messaging to analog messaging and then to print is something we thought direct mail could do. It’s a way of taking the discussion a step further.

DELIVER: Do you think there is potential for even greater interactivity between offline and online communications?
TINGIRIS: I absolutely think so. There are some new XML standards for portable contacts, which is something that was recently adopted by Google, that standardizes the way information is stored. It allows social networking sites to share contact information amongst one another, including postal information. Which means that now, if I’ve got my Google contacts, or my contacts at LinkedIn, or any one of those sites, I can share them across my social networks, and it becomes one or two clicks to send a printed communication using a service like enthusem. There’s a whole new frontier for direct mail.