Tremendous gains are possible for marketing professionals to increase the effectiveness of their digital marketing campaigns by integrating traditional print assets that reinforce brand messaging. When print is mixed into multichannel marketing campaigns, your business adds a component to your customer communications that is consistently reported to be the most trusted and engaging ways to set your business apart from the competition.

Here are seven advantages your business can realize when print marketing is included in digital campaign strategy.

1. Enhanced Brand Recognition – Placing your brand on print marketing reinforces your brand identity in multiple places where your customers are likely to encounter and remember it. When your brand’s visual identity and message are consistent across both digital and print marketing materials and adapted to the preferences for how they receive marketing messages, your business will become more memorable with every encounter. Direct mail on its own delivers great results, but when it’s added to a multichannel marketing mix, conversions increase sharply. According to the USPS, marketers saw their ROI increase by 60% when combining direct mail with digital channels.
   
   
2. A Fuller Multichannel Experience – Using print in coordination with digital marketing allows your customers to seamlessly transition between offline and online experiences. You give them a more holistic and convenient way to connect with your business that harmonizes with their lifestyle. One way to connect print and digital is with QR codes or Personal  URLs (PURLs) in print materials that lead to websites and landing pages and can be personalized to allow for better tracking of performance. When you meet your audience where they are, you increase the chances of engagement and conversions.  According to Retail Dive, the average engagement rate of campaigns using three or more channels is 18.96% across all channels while single-channel campaigns earned only 5.4%.
   
   
3. Improved Personalization – You can use the data you’ve gathered through your digital channels to enjoy the benefits that only direct mail personalization delivers. Innovative print technologies, like variable data printing and software that handprints addresses, greetings, and signatures, allow for highly personalized messaging that creates emotional connections for even greater conversions. You can tailor print messaging to promote online events, use customer buying habits to offer special print deals, and even encourage them to return to complete an abandoned on-line shopping cart with value-added reminders sent by mail. Personalized direct mail has even proven effective for reviving relationships with dormant customers. According to a recent ANA study, 70% of customers surveyed have re-started a relationship because of direct mail.
   
   
4. Increased Brand Reach and Engagement – Not everyone engages with every marketing channel equally. Your customers have preferences for the way they enjoy hearing from your business, and for many of them physical marketing materials like direct mail, brochures, and catalogs rank high. And it is not just older demographics that care about direct mail. It’s also a desired form of communication for age groups that you might think would rely only on digital throughout their purchasing journey. A USPS study shows that 57% of boomers, 45% of GenX, 41% of millennials, and 37% of GenZ would be disappointed if they stopped getting physical mail. 
   
   
5. Higher Response Rates Across Channels – One of the remarkable aspects of adding print marketing into marketing strategies is that in addition to consistently recording high returns on investment (ROI) on its own, print marketing dramatically boosts the performance of other marketing channels. Your customers are more likely to take action when they encounter consistent messaging across different media. It’s reported that multichannel ad campaigns which include direct mail have 20% higher ROI than campaigns that don’t and according to Writers Block Live, businesses that opt to use direct mail and digital ads together lead to a 28% increase in conversion rates and a 450% increase in response rates.
   
   
6. Increased Credibility – When print marketing is used in tandem with other marketing channels, it can add legitimacy and improve your brand’s perceived reliability and trustworthiness. There is something to the physical form of print marketing collateral, that by enabling recipients to touch, hold, and open it, makes the experience memorable and sincere. When a customer interacts with a promotional item or a product, it has been shown to influence mood, behavior and buying habits. According to DMR, 39% of customers say that they try a business for the first time because of direct mail advertising. 
   
   
7. Optimize Channels for Measurable Results – Innovative interactive print content technologies make it possible to track, collect, and analyze the effectiveness of print campaigns integrated with digital marketing campaigns. Using unique phone numbers, URLs, or QR codes gives your print materials more responsive and robust measuring capabilities, and provides your business with valuable insights into customer behavior. Easy-to-use multichannel marketing platforms then lets you apply this knowledge to improve connections and stand out with customers across all of your marketing channels.  Harvard Business Review observed the shopping behaviors of 46,000 consumers and found out that around 73% of consumers prefer shopping through multiple channels.

It is now easier for businesses to coordinate their digital marketing with direct mail to create cohesive brand messaging everywhere a customer goes for information. Whether online or offline, with multichannel marketing your businesses reach customers with personalized and relevant at every point along their buying journey.

Contact a Marketing.com multichannel marketing expert today to learn more about how we can help you connect the dots of your digital and print campaigns.