In a highly competitive market climate, integrated marketing communications are the fastest path to make your brand memorable — and help you enjoy decent response rates. According to Think With Google research, marketing leaders are 1.5 times more likely to use integrated marketing than laggards. They also are more willing to implement advanced automation practices and use measurement learning for digital marketing.

However, despite bringing more gains than standard marketing efforts, an integrated marketing campaign requires strong technological backup. Sailthru has an integration with Inkit, which enables you to complement your online marketing efforts with direct mail advertising, which boasted 9% response rates in 2018. Moreover, using an automated mail service you can seamlessly integrate your digital marketing software with direct mail solutions.

Want more tips on integrated marketing? Here are 10:

1. Research Your Potential Customers

For any type of a marketing campaign, start by discovering your target audience. Research your market and your potential customers: their demographic profile, user stories, and possible needs. Learn about their preferences and find something that will trigger the right emotional response. This will help you shape the key message of your product and develop a more well-thought marketing strategy.

2. Go Offline and Use Direct Mail

The simultaneous use of all marketing channels is the core and basis of any integrated marketing campaign. Therefore, you should definitely consider direct mail as a supplemental tool. There’s no need to go to the post office and manually stuff envelopes. Thanks to an automated mail service like Inkit, you can entrust printing and delivery to a third party and customize your communications with elegant templates.

3. Use Consistent Messaging

Integrated marketing is synonymous with consistency. Consistent messaging will create a strong association with your brand in customers’ minds. They will perceive your marketing as a familiar brand identity that deserves their trust. This will increase response rates and encourage conversions, whether you’re from a small business or an enterprise organization.

4. Customize for Different Target Audiences

Although there are no two identical customers, your clientele usually consists of several key target audiences. In this respect, your primary task is to single out these groups and customize integrated marketing communications accordingly. With Marigold Engage by Sailthru, for example, you can create a smart mailing list based on all characteristics and tastes of recipients.

5. Synchronize

Without synchronization, you’ll waste a lot of time and effort on every marketing channel, repeating the same operations over and over again. In addition, it’ll be extremely difficult to measure your achievements and combine them into a single statistics. Use automation tools, which allows synchronizing data from your website, social media, and messengers to manage it in one place. This helps keep your integrated marketing campaign more focused.

6. Collect and Measure Customer Data

You will never know how well an integrated marketing campaign performs without the data. Based on accurate and reliable numbers, you will be able to make your sales promotion more cost effective and identify the areas that should be improved. Make sure to measure and evaluate the return on investment, response rates, user behavior, and other indicators available for all marketing channels you use. This will give you an aggregate picture to redistribute your budget and modify the marketing strategy if necessary.

7. Use Branding Elements

To be effective, any integrated marketing campaign should be focused around a single potent idea. Remember that modern consumers don’t buy products — they buy a part of the story. Allocate a budget for real professionals to get a detailed style guide with a matching logotype, typography, and color palette. Brand elements will create a basis for your integrated marketing campaign design and build brand awareness. Consistent brand presentation through all marketing channels increases income by 23%. These elements will be associated with your product as long as it exists.

8. Set Clear Rules for Promotions

When you launch an integrated marketing campaign for sales promotion, make sure to be open and honest. Indicate a discount rate on your leaflets, detail a loyalty program on the website, or describe the benefits for subscribers. The information must be easily accessible and identical across all your resources. This will help attract potential customers and convert them into buyers.

9. Automate Everything That Can Be Automated

Automation can make your integrated marketing campaign more cost effective. To achieve maximum efficiency, you can even combine several tools with complementary features. In particular, Sailthru’s marketing automation service can be integrated with a direct mail automation tool offered by Inkit. While Marigold Engage by Sailthru collects customer data and supports customized mailing lists, Inkit allows customers to connect these lists to send personalized offline mail. A one-time 30 second integration will save considerable time — and budget that was previously wasted on routine operations.

10. Test Your Integrated Marketing Communications

It’s better to be safe than sorry. Don’t miss an opportunity to A/B test your marketing communications on a small audience. Ask your colleagues what they think about its content and design to get rid of possible flaws before the end recipients see them. With direct mail, find a mail service that offers a customizable batch size. This way, you’ll get a chance to test mail advertising prior to reaching your customers or making a large investment.

Yaryna Dutko is part of Inkit’s team.