Customized Multi-channel Marketing - hosted by L2

Happy New Year!! 

I wonder what this new year holds for the Marketing world, this past year I heard a lot about multichannel marketing and I am expecting to hear much more about Marketing Automation this year. 

I am amazed to see how Marketing has changed the past few years.  When I was talking about L2 in my previous blog, I mentioned that mastering the customization of the online templating world for direct mail pieces started us off as a company.  Now that we’ve done the toughest part, we found that it was then easy to focus on the other areas of combining those customized direct mail pieces with personalized urls, approval workflows, custom reporting, and email ALL out of the same online database and software platform. 

This article was written recently by Barbara Pellow, the former Kodak CMO.

http://www.dpsmagazine.com/content/ContentCT.asp?P=318

I continue to be amazed at how many companies are headed this direction, but don’t really know the path on how to get there, but I have hope. Why? Well, hopefully now that Multi Channel Marketing was all the buzz in the last year (and from the number of conferences and meetings I had, buzz may be an understatement), people will really step up and think about what they could do by centralizing all their people onto one platform to automate processes. Just imagine a large company which has several marketing teams (I know several. Ok, really I know 100’s of them), and these teams can break down their job function by task-messaging, creative, direct mail etc. Then throw in additional marketing agencies (often more than one),and guess what….none of whom speak to each other well, and some don’t speak at all. 

Now, think about the optimum way these teams can work together. The agency could do the creative, have it route to the appropriate departments for personalization with their respective databases or their various legal departments, and then streamline the output either to emails or physical pieces to printers, BOTH mediums with the same purls on them.  Each message with the right creative. Each customer getting focused creative that appeals to them.  This is the holy grail of direct marketing and it is what I talk to companies about on a daily basis.