At first glance it may appear a paradox — an e-mail direct marketing company moving into direct mail. However, e-Dialog, Lexington, MA, says its new multichannel Precision Dynamic Printing capability will help its clients retain customers and move them to action.
Precision Dynamic Printing has been integrated into e-Dialog's Precision Central, its e-marketing platform, which will let clients deliver both personalized direct mail and e-mail messages, e-Dialog announces today.
It became apparent to e-Dialog that companies wanted to use e-mail and direct mail in multichannel campaigns, but their efforts were hindered by the logistics associated with running separate e-mail and mail campaigns.
“It is no secret that real-time, cross-media campaigns, when done correctly, can be extremely effective. Unfortunately, they are rarely part of a marketer's ongoing communication plan because they are difficult to execute and often require a lot of work to be repeated for each channel engaged,” e-Dialog CEO John Rizzi said.
Precision Dynamic Printing lets e-Dialog clients run personalized e-mail and direct mail campaigns from the same platform. For instance, e-Dialog clients that publish magazines have traditionally executed their renewals through e-mail. If a magazine subscriber changes his e-mail address, a renewal message will bounce and the customer may be lost. Using the new platform, an e-mail bounce would trigger a direct mail piece informing the subscriber that it is time for renewal.
This multichannel technology also has implications for using behavioral data to target customers. Through testing it can be established whether a customer is more responsive to direct mail or e-mail, and then a customer can be targeted through the appropriate medium.
For significant events, marketers can use this multichannel technology to hit their customers through two separate media simultaneously in order to increase awareness.
So far, e-Dialog has three clients using Precision Dynamic Printing: a publishing company, a business-to-business online services company and a retailer.
