By Kurt Konow, Production Print Marketing Strategist, Ricoh Americas Corporation
Understanding multichannel marketing has been a recent mandate for print service providers of all sizes. We have been hearing about it for some time now. The good news of all this is that it presents print service providers with an excellent opportunity to expand their portfolio of products and services. However, the bad news is, it is not always an easy transition.
It is clear that there are a number of considerations to take into account when it comes to offering multichannel solutions broad enough to get results. First, the design and execution of a multichannel campaign involves strategic as well as tactical planning to ensure you are creating a common graphic design scheme and consistent messaging across all media—keeping the campaign coordinated through every touch. Next comes determining what actions your customers want from their prospects or customers and how you want them to respond to your call to action. Adhering to the true definition of multichannel, it is important to offer the ability to respond in multiple ways to any given campaign, and at the end of the day, you have to make sure those responses can be captured and measured.
In addition to time challenges in creating these campaigns, there are challenges in finding customers who really understand how to effectively use different channels to attract different demographic groups in order to maximize the reach and response rates for their messages. But for now, let’s just focus on how to easily offer a full range of integrated, targeted campaign services.
Ok. I know by now you have heard all this before. Yet the reality is, while you are trying to integrate multichannel capabilities into your offerings, you still have to operate and respond to the business at hand. Those of us at Ricoh who work closely with print providers get that. That is why we created something called 1 to1 Create. It’s an affordable, cloud-based subscription service designed to allow you to provide multichannel, multi-touch marketing programs in a manageable low-risk way. Currently, several printers are testing a pilot program with great success. However, soon it will be available through an easy to navigate portal that will give you turnkey templates that will make it easy to create customizable direct mail postcards, brochures, e-blasts and more all targeted to the markets you serve every day – including retail, education and services such as your local dentist.
1 to 1 Create also has ROI tools for campaign tracking. Keeping track of the success of your customer’s marketing campaign, by channel, will offer rich insights into where the target audience can most effectively be reached. Doing so will also help you evaluate and fine-tune multichannel campaigns with your customers to ensure that messages are being communicated effectively in each channel.
Maybe some of you saw the benefits of 1 to 1 Create at PRINT 13. If not, and you would like to hear more, please contact me directly at:
I welcome the opportunity to show you how easy it is to move beyond a traditional product and services portfolio and offer valuable and effective multichannel solutions.
