BrandMaker.com - Direct marketing: Tool-based marketing with BrandMaker
“Printing advertising materials, ordering giveaways and all that in time and for the right target group – direct marketing activities occupy an incredible amount of our dealer’s resources and are very costly.”
Company X has a nation-wide network with more than 500 dealerships. For the launch of the new product, a direct marketing campaign is to be arranged. The package consists of two mailings, an announcement and an invitation for the promotional event that is set for the launch of the product.
The announcement is to be composed of a form letter and a product flyer. Both are to be individualized by the dealers. The invitation also includes a form letter which can be adjusted individually as well as a reply card and a giveaway. Meanwhile, the company advertises the new product with a national TV and popular magazine campaign. At the same time, the central marketing department needs to assure that the form letter and the collateral used by the local dealerships are in accordance with the newly brand image.
To implement the action, the company is using BrandMaker as central implementation platform: the Marketing Planner, the Web-to-Print module and the Shop Module. The bundle provides for the communication of the following activities and the necessary explanations for the local marketers which are provided by the Marketing Planner. The individualization of the print elements within the mailings is effected with the module Media Management. The ordering of the mailing elements is managed via the Promotional Products Shop. The central marketing planner and the agency of the head office therefore upload the necessary elements in BrandMaker.
When the local dealer D logs on to BrandMaker, on the main landing page, the so called living diary, the news is displayed that the head office is planning a mailing campaign for the launch of the new product. At the click of a button, he enters the Marketing Planner. There, he sees at a glance when the campaign is planned to take place. Moreover, he has the chance to view previews of the provided materials as well as detailed information. He decides to participate and transfers the campaign into his BrandMaker shopping-cart. The shopping-cart is a kind of To-Do-List, in which the dealer can see all his current tasks for a planned activity. Thus, at the same time, the campaign also gets transferred to his individual Marketing Planner. This is a second display of the Planner in which the merchant can view only his personal activities. In addition to centrally planned marketing activities, he can also plan individual local marketing activities with this tool.
Thereafter, he switches to his shopping-cart, to start immediately with the To-Dos of the new campaign. He recognizes that he has to personalize the form letter and the flyer for the first mailing. For the second mailing he has to revise the form letter as well as the reply card and order the giveaways for the campaign. Besides, the shopping-cart contains the tasks “import customer data”. This task is needed to fill the form letter with the addresses and generate the final letters for the mailing. After that he starts with the individualization and ordering of the print elements using the Web-to-Print module. The module offers the possibility to enter individualizd content while maintaining CI conformity of the print materials. The promotional products simply need to be ordered, just as buying goods in online stores. The number of giveaways to order is detected automatically by the system when the customer data is imported.
For the dealer, now the campaign is already done, because the central marketing department has charged a service provider, who assorts and posts the mailings of the dealers. Some campaigns require personal packaging and shipping. In this case either a local service can be charged via tool or the local dealer manages all by himself.
During the campaign, the central marketing manager has the opportunity to check statistics, like the participation rates of the dealerships at any time and on-demand.