Why you need to integrate sending into your marketing mix today

KEY POINTS

• The ‘Four P’s’ may be outdated in today’s marketing approach.
• Building relationships with customers can help your company stand out.
• Gift giving or sending is a great approach to help increase revenues.

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Marketing Requires More Sophistication

Traditionally, a business’ marketing mix describes its strategic approach to align the “Four P’s,” which are:

• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion

While that’s a good starting framework, it’s somewhat outdated; today’s marketing mix requires a bit more sophistication. In today’s world, companies that place the customer at the center of everything they do tend to succeed and be more profitable.

A Modern Approach to Marketing

A more modern approach to the marketing mix should focus on defining target customers as tightly as possible, with clear distinctions between different customer profiles. Only by having a solid understanding of who a company’s customers are can marketers even start to define the traditional four Ps.

But that’s still only telling part of the story, especially when it comes to promotion. Traditionally, promotion referred to advertising and media strategy. But today’s customers can easily block ads, or at least ignore them to some degree, and marketers have needed to develop more personable and personalized approaches that make consumers’ needs, wants, and desires central to all marketing activities.

That’s why sending is an essential, strategic tool for connecting with—and converting—customers today. Let’s take a closer look at the role sending can play in today’s modern marketing mixes.

Integrate Sending to Build Relationships

First and foremost, it’s important to look at sending as a tool not just for marketing, lead generation or nurturing, etc. Marketers need to understand that sending is about building relationships with prospective customers and strengthening relationships with current ones.

Relationships are generally based around trust and mutual benefit, and sending can play a role in both. Many times, sending acts as an opening salvo, a “Hi, how are you doing? We’re thinking of you.” But it can also deliver the first promise that your company’s products or services are there to solve your customers’ pain points.

An excellent example is Sendoso client Ontra, a software company that streamlines routine legal work. Ontra sent branded umbrellas to prospects in the U.K. (a very rainy area) along with a clever card that read, “We’ve got you covered. Let us handle your NDA so you can make it rain.” Not only was this a practical, useful gift, it enabled Ontra to demonstrate its commitment to helping its customers in a thoughtful way.

Personalization and Gift Giving

Most customers today can get what they want, when they want it, and how they want it, thanks in large part to digital technology. This applies to both digital and physical items a customer may want, as well as services. Regardless of whether it’s B2C or B2B, today’s customers want—and expect—personalized experiences. According to McKinsey, for example, 71% of consumers expect to receive personalized experiences and 76 percent get upset when they don’t.

In other words, customers expect to be treated like humans and not just a customer number.

From a marketing standpoint, digital technology enables marketers to gather more information from customers and prospects than ever before, while also targeting customers more accurately than ever before. In fact, it is digital technology that enables marketers to deliver on customer expectations when it comes to personalization.

One way to personalize the entire customer experience is to incorporate personalized gift giving. Long gone are the days of spamming cheap, branded tchotchkes to get people to remember your name. Today, sending prospects and customers a personalized gift that they actually want demonstrates that you’re getting to know them on an individual level.

Getting Your Return on Investment (ROI)

Building stronger relationships and treating customers like humans are both great reasons to incorporate sending into your marketing mix in and of themselves. But there’s a self-serving reason as well:

Achieving a high ROI for sending might be counter-intuitive to some, given that you can buy digital advertising as inexpensively as $.01/CPM. But when you have response rates that are hundreds or even thousands of times higher than click-thru rates of digital advertising, you are going to see your ROI for sending outperform as well.

In other words, in digital advertising, you often have to take a shotgun approach followed up with retargeting. While individual CPMs might be relatively low, the cost to reach enough people to actually convert into customers can balloon very quickly, which drives down the ROI.

Sending, on the other hand, typically has an excellent return on investment, and the more personalized the send the better it usually performs. Case in point: FireMon, an agile security policy platform, used Sendoso to drive attendance to their virtual security cocktail parties called Sips & Security. Combined with personalized messages, FireMon sent registered attendees a cocktail kit that included all the ingredients needed to make a cocktail. But they didn’t stop there. As a thank you to attendees, FireMon also sent personalized follow-up messages and eGift cards, asking for follow-up meetings.

All these activities resulted in influencing a more than $4 million pipeline, beating their projected ROI by 570%. In this case, FireMon used personalization to focus on building relationships with prospects, making their success a slam dunk. It wasn’t the only marketing activity they did, but it certainly was one of the most effective.

Want to learn more about how to integrate sending into your marketing mix? Sendoso can help! Schedule a demo with our sending experts, and we’ll show you exactly how powerful sending can be.