Category

Marketing Strategy

NVISION Insights and Innovation Team
In Digital Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Print Marketing, Direct Mail

Integrating Direct Mail Into Your Digital Marketing Strategy for 2018

Direct mail has long been one of the most trusted tools in a marketer’s arsenal. But as the digital revolution in marketing continues to grow and evolve, so too do the possibilities that direct mail presents. By understanding some of the newest and hottest trends in integrating digital and direct mail marketing, savvy CMOs can position their brands for ongoing success well into an unpredictable future. That’s according to Jason Sullock of IT Pro Portal, who breaks down a few of the most promising trends in direct mail for 2018.

Omnichannel Integration

It may be surprising to think of direct mail as a way to unify your multi-channel digital marketing efforts, but it’s actually a fantastic opportunity to do so.  By incorporating printed QR codes into their direct mailers, marketers can make it extremely simple and convenient to direct recipients to the landing page, product demo, or special promotion you want them to see. You can also include unique URLs linked directly to your mailers. That way, when your customers visit that URL, you can track the fact that the mailer sent them there, and you can better measure the impact of your direct mailing efforts

thinking girl with digital shopping symbols

Programmatic Personalization

Programmatic mail links your direct mailing efforts to each customer’s specific online activities, but in the opposite manner of the omnichannel integration we discussed above. By using digital tracking and analysis of customer behavior – things like what pages they’ve visited, what products have they’ve searched for, and what items they’ve abandoned in their shopping carts – marketers can then send direct mailers that speak to these specific interests and talking points. An email reminder to complete your online checkout? Easily ignored and deleted. A colorful, eye-catching piece of mail delivered right to your front door? That’s much more effective at converting shoppers into customers.

Augmented Reality

As more brands try to provide a truly unique and engaging customer experience by venturing into augmented reality (AR), the possibilities for using AR to supplement direct mail, and vice versa, are growing. Marketers can design even rudimentary AR apps so that when a customer scans a QR code included in a direct mailer, the brand’s logo appears or a product video plays. In more advanced versions, scanning a direct mail QR code in an AR application can display three-dimensional virtual versions of your products, creating lasting and meaningful impressions.

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Why NVISION?

For more than three decades we’ve partnered with Fortune 500 companies to deliver marketing operations solutions. Led by a strategic account management team, we’ll help you develop, procure, fulfill and distribute printed collateral, signage, point-of-purchase displays, direct mail, branded merchandise and much more.

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NVISION Insights and Innovation Team
In Marketing Trends, Marketing Strategy

How Mobile Presents Big Opportunities for Brick and Mortar Retailers

man looking at mobile - opportunity

Brick-and-mortar retail spaces make it easy for customers to connect with brands via meaningful interactions and vice versa. Retail stores are in many ways more personal and direct that e-commerce transactions. That said, mobile still plays an enormous role in the ongoing success of physical retail spaces, and those stores that can adapt and position themselves to capture these opportunities can set their brand apart.

That’s according to Stephanie Vozza at Shopify, who points out that a recent study found that 92% of consumers want to shop in stores equipped with mobile solutions. And that goes beyond offering in-store WiFi. Here are three of the best ways brick-and-mortar retailers can make their stores more mobile-friendly.

Use Geotargeting, Beacons to Attract Foot Traffic

Location-aware beacon technology allows retailers to deliver highly-targeted mobile ads to users within a set geographic distance of the store. These strategic geotargeting plays provide promotional offers that encourage nearby shoppers to visit your store. They can be deployed around your store, around your competitors’ stores to lure them away and gain market share, or anywhere you prefer. They work, too: the same study found that 85% of respondents would like to receive more geotargeted promotions as part of their retail shopping experience.

mobile-pay

Offer Mobile Payment and Checkout Technology

Bring the speed and convenience of online checkout to your brick-and-mortar shopping experience. Retailers can use mobile wallet apps to allow customers to pay on the sales floor using their smartphones.

“This benefits retailers with long line issues, but also creates a dynamic that allows customers to truly be able to shop on their own terms in a way that is comfortable for them,” Vozza writes. In fact, 61% of shoppers prefer using kiosks and self-checkouts. Shoppers’ preferences are rapidly changing, and the ability to offer personalized experiences that fit their demands will set retailers apart from the crowd.

Welcome Shoppers in for Showrooming

“Showrooming” is a fairly recent ecommerce phenomenon where customers visit stores to check out products in person with the explicit intent of buying them online later. The value-add for brick-and-mortar spaces, in this case, isn’t lower prices or ease of checkout, but how immersive and convenient of a “test drive” experience they can provide with their “showroom.”

Clothing retailer Zara, for example, adds iPads to many of its dressing rooms so customers can quickly and easily request a different size or style to try on. “Fusing the physical and digital world can create powerful and lasting memories for customers and a brand,” Vozza writes.

Here are a few simple ways to get started embracing showrooming:

  1. Establish a reliable WiFi connection in-store so your customers’ mobile devices can link to your network.
  2. Put real customer reviews at your customers’ fingertips with quotes and scores next to product displays.
  3. Offer complimentary overnight shipping, so customers still get that “buy it now” satisfaction that can help them pull the trigger.

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Mobile is changing brick-and-mortar retail. But by planning for this change, and positioning yourself to seize the new opportunities it presents, brands can make sure their physical retail channels stay profitable for many years to come.

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Why NVISION?

For more than three decades we’ve partnered with Fortune 500 companies to deliver marketing operations solutions. Led by a strategic account management team, we’ll help you develop, procure, fulfill and distribute printed collateral, signage, point-of-purchase displays, direct mail, branded merchandise and much more.

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NVISION Insights and Innovation Team
In Marketing Trends, Marketing Strategy

Future Focus: How Brick-and-Mortar Retailers Can Shift for Success

arrow with success

Far from making brick-and-mortar retail spaces obsolete, the explosion of e-commerce has simply reshaped, and repurposed, the ideal deployment and leverage of retail spaces. That’s according to Alexandra Sheehan on Shopify, who explains that despite the looming challenges of evolving technology, increasing competition, and changing consumer behaviors, smart brands can plan for these changes and create opportunities from them by “future-proofing” their businesses. Let’s take a look at a few key areas poised for forward-looking success.

In-Store Experiences: Driving More Sales

In-store experiences – that is, creating fully immersive multisensory displays that engage with your customers – are becoming increasingly important for multichannel retailers.

“Unique store experiences give shoppers a compelling reason to visit a location and engage with a brand,” Sheehan explains. Beyond the normal value-adding propositions of promotional marketing materials, unique in-store experiences help drive traffic to your brick-and-mortar stores and more revenue through your physical channels. They are a clever way to diversify your revenue streams across a multichannel business model.

What’s more, they create an immersive “identity” for your brand, one that sticks with customers and contributes enormously to brand loyalty. The ability to quickly create dynamic in-store experiences that change to fit your marketing messaging and brand identity will set retailers apart.

three female shoppers-retail

In-Store Events: A Marketing Bonanza

Hosting in-store events are becoming an increasingly popular – and effective – way to increase foot traffic and buzz around brick-and-mortar stores. Fitness apparel retailers, such as Lululemon, have begun hosting yoga classes, complete with branded giveaway mats and water bottles. Anthropologie, the apparel and home goods retailer, hosts pop-up “markets” in its stores and provides shoppers with free, branded tote bags.

The key to the future of physical retail is creating value that online shopping can’t offer. With an agile and reliable marketing supply chain to make sure everything arrives on time, on price, and goes off without a hitch, in-store events are a great way to do just that.

New Customer Behaviors, New Possibilities

One of the most unique phenomena of the age of digital commerce is the rise of “showrooming.” Showrooming is the practice of visiting a brick-and-mortar store to see or interact with a product with the intention of buying it online later.

This requires a fundamental re-thinking of best practices for in-store marketing materials and displays. Before e-commerce, with physical as the only or primary channel, it was important to devote floor space to as many of your available products as possible, and to make that space easily navigable. Now, with digital analytics, creating high-conversion, engaging, narrative in-store displays for the most in-demand, best-selling, or highest profit-margin products can lead to greater revenue and marketing ROI. Brands must invest the time, effort, and resources towards understanding these new and changing marketing best practices, because they truly are an investment in ongoing future success.

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Why NVISION?

For more than three decades we’ve partnered with Fortune 500 companies to deliver marketing operations solutions. Led by a strategic account management team, we’ll help you develop, procure, fulfill and distribute printed collateral, signage, point-of-purchase displays, direct mail, branded merchandise and much more.

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NVISION Insights and Innovation Team
In Marketing Strategy, Retail Trends, Print Marketing

How to Sell More with High-Conversion Retail Displays

mall-shop-high-conversion

Online shopping and e-commerce continue to shift the way savvy retail marketers approach their business models, especially as they pertain to the optimization of brick-and-mortar retail stores.

That’s according to Humayan Khan at Shopify, who explains that more and more retailers are treating their physical storefronts as “experience centers,” designed to use “visual merchandising best practices to help the products sell themselves.”

Khan takes a look at some of those best practices, as well as how agile marketing operations and supply chains can help create high-converting product displays that catch shoppers’ attention and sell more.

Show Your Customers, Don’t Tell Them

Customers want to be able to truly envision how they could use your product in their lives, and they don’t want to have to guess. That’s why creating effective displays that show what life with your product looks like is so important.

Kitchenware stores, for example, don’t just feature the kitchen counter tile that is for sale. They build out an entire display kitchen, featuring their beautiful countertop at the center of it. “Can’t you imagine hosting a cocktail party in this kitchen?” they ask. “Wouldn’t your life be so much more stylish with this countertop tile?” Displays sell a lifestyle, a vision, not just a product. Use your in-store visual displays to create this compelling experience for your customers.

three female shoppers-retail

Engage Their Senses to Draw Them In

The key to immersive shopping, Khan says, is to create a “multi-sensory experience,” which he calls “sensory branding.” While customers consciously associate your brand with your visual marketing materials, like colors schemes and logos, they also subconsciously associate your brand with their four other senses, as well.

Sight

This is the most important sense to capture. The average customer spends no more than eight seconds looking at a display. Leveraging captivating and engaging visual cues like lighting, symmetry, and contrast all factor into the visual effectiveness of your marketing materials.

Sound

A movie is only as compelling as its soundtrack, and the same goes for retail stores. Slower, more relaxed music facilitates a slower shopping pace, while Top 40 hits engage the attention of teenagers and the 18-34 demographic. Further, if you have an exciting new product you can’t wait to share with your customers, pair its display with equally exciting, dynamic music. Trying to convey the premium, luxury factor of your products? Classical waltzes and “upscale” music help convey your brand essence.

Touch

Touch is extraordinarily intimate, and tied strongly to memory and recall. If at all possible, retailers should feature physical samples and examples of their products within in-store displays so customers can touch it, hold it, and feel it. Even the best-designed marketing emails can’t move your product from abstract to tangible in the minds of your customers as quickly as tactile interaction.

Smell

Scent is the sense most closely tied to memory, and it is a powerful tool to keep your product and your brand top-of-mind with your customers. Whatever attitude you are trying to convey – ruggedness for outdoor equipment, coziness for furniture, deliciousness for baked goods – pair it with a scent that conveys it directly to your customer’s brain. There is an entire field known as “scent marketing” which focuses on the psychology of scent, and marketers who understand it can leverage it to their advantage.

Taste

Obviously, this is more practical for consumable goods, but allowing your customers to sample edible products is exactly the same as allowing them to try on clothes. It is a massively effective best-practice.

Change and Adapt, Always

As society changes, so too will your customers and their demands. To stagnate is to die in retail marketing, and agility and adaptability are the keys to longevity.

Brands that can not only execute on the above, but do so frequently, and to new and different specifications over time, can continue to meet their customers’ needs. This way, they remain indispensable to their customers, and win their long-term loyalty.

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By partnering with a trusted marketing supply chain expert like NVISION, your brand can leverage the power of high-converting in-store displays and win more revenue.

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Why NVISION?

For more than three decades we’ve partnered with Fortune 500 companies to deliver marketing operations solutions. Led by a strategic account management team, we’ll help you develop, procure, fulfill and distribute printed collateral, signage, point-of-purchase displays, direct mail, branded merchandise and much more.

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NVISION Insights and Innovation Team
In Building Products, Marketing Performance Measurement, Marketing Operations, Marketing Strategy

Disruption in Building Materials Marketing: A Guide for CMOs

“Disruption” is a hot word right now in marketing. It calls to mind the Ubers, PayPals, and Yelps of the world. Disruption can mean huge profits and slashed costs for companies that pull it off successfully, and a place in the pantheon of revered brands.

But for CMOs, who must try to navigate through this ever-changing sea of disruptions in consumer behaviors, business environments, and new technologies, handling this task, and identifying which opportunities to capitalize on, can be a challenge. That’s why Navigate-the-Channel offers these helpful tips for coming out on top to CMOs riding the wave of disruption.

Explore and Understand New Technology

It wasn’t even five years ago that virtual reality, machine learning, A.I., and the Internet of Things were all pipe dreams. Now, they’re household concepts, and marketers are integrating them into their strategies.

Take Marriott Hotels, for example. It uses VR headsets to allow vacation shoppers to virtually “explore” some of its flagship properties in places like London, Hawaii, and, Thailand, telling its hospitality story better than a pamphlet ever could. VR, and the ability to “walk through” structures has exciting applications for the building materials industry.

As NTC puts it, “these technologies should not be cultivated for their own sake,” but CMOs should seek to understand both their applications and their appeal to consumers.

businessman holding tablet

Use Data to Consider Customers Holistically

Big data has brought big changes to how marketers develop customer personas and ideal customer profiles. In the past, CMOs grouped large swaths of customers into similar “personas” and segmented their marketing efforts at that level.

Now, with the rise of “Big Data” and, more importantly, the machine learning power to analyze, process, and make sense of it, CMOs have an unprecedented opportunity to target their customers at an even more granular level.

As NTC explains, “In a small industry like building materials, everyone knows everyone else. Each person within a sales funnel must be considered fully,” and that includes considering their organization’s challenges, goals, budgets, geographic markets, and more. CMOs should explore investments in big data analysis that can help create these hyper-specific buyer profiles.

Real-Time Responsiveness and Connectivity

The Internet of Things is rapidly redefining traditional marketing “channels.” Now, refrigerators can recommend packaged foods to consumers, and windows can suggest more energy-efficient blinds.

CMOs should take a step back and consider how certain societal and consumer attitudes have already changed regarding styles, materials, and processes. “For instance, certain manufacturing processes that would have been industry standard within building materials might now be considered anti-environment and cause enough of a stir to hinder business,” explains NTC. The use of asbestos in insulation materials is one of the most famous examples.

Smart CMOs should take into consideration which aspects of their business may become the subject of consumer attention in the future, and they should prepare their marking supply chain and marketing operations to be agile and responsive to these changes as they arise.

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Why NVISION?

For more than three decades we’ve partnered with Fortune 500 companies to deliver marketing operations solutions. Led by a strategic account management team, we’ll help you develop, procure, fulfill and distribute printed collateral, signage, point-of-purchase displays, direct mail, branded merchandise and much more.

LEARN MORE