An interesting 2006 DMA Conference article from DM News highlights multichannel marketing’s critical role in reaching today’s consumers and the resulting challenges to determine response metrics. Again, when I read articles such as this I think of how we speak to donors or prospective donors. More than ever before, donors are in tune to various “frequencies” of possible response transmissions — direct mail, interactive, online, print, broadcast, face-to-face. Determining how “signals” work together, and how to attribute proper response metrics for each message transmission is getting difficult to accurately track. From the article:
Casey Carey, senior vice president of Abacus Alliance Solutions, the multichannel database arm of Abacus, spoke to the number of complications that can arise as the available points of purchase and cross-channel marketing efforts increase.
“I say one thing about multichannel marketing and that’s just: complexity,” Mr. Casey said.
By first separating a company’s offer channels from its response channels, marketers can focus budget planning around the offer channels to decide which media mix is the most effective, he said.
It’s my experience that donors are becoming more adept at moving between response channels before making a final donation decision. As well, today’s fundraising professionals are beginning to move beyond the endless testing of small things in traditional channels (e.g. 1st class stamp versus bulk rate postage) and are putting more thinking around determining how individual fundraising efforts work together to create the desired response.
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