Are you confusing your customers? Not on purpose of course, but is it possible that your messages and communications across various communication channels are inconsistent? Failure to pay attention to how your messages work together can lead to wandering and misguided customers and prospects. Not exactly the best way to attract new business and maintain customer loyalty!

I just put together a new presentation for commercial printers that included ideas about ways to forge stronger customer relationships. Part of that presentation included several examples from companies that were using direct mail to promote certain products or aspects of their companies. We saw many cases where the printed material didn't match up. The additional content that customers saw when they scanned the QR code on the document was often entirely unrelated.

In some instances, customer acquisition mailings referred prospects to web landing pages that focused on services that were available only to existing customers. And several marketers seemed to think that sending prospects to their home page (that didn't even mention the offer in the mail piece) was the way to go.

Important Concepts - Regardless of the Channel

This lack of relevance and consistency isn't limited to direct mail elements. The same things happen with email blasts, ads, and newsletters. Maybe you've had this experience: An email or an ad got your attention and you clicked through to find out more - then spent a considerable amount of time looking for references to the offer or item that piqued your interest. How long did you continue to search? If they can't find it quickly, most customers give up before ever locating the material.

There's nothing wrong with using your company home page as the default landing site if the purpose of your direct mail or emailed message is simply to build brand awareness. The tactic can deliver long term results. But it's been our experience that customers and prospects usually need a more specific reason to click through. Providing that reason is your first objective. Effectively handling customers after they take the desired action is quite another.

Guiding Customers Toward Your Objectives

You've got only a short time to grab the reader's attention. The path to the content that enticed customers to come to your site should be immediately obvious from the home page. If it's not, you're better off utilizing a landing page that is specific to the offer or the content described in your outbound message. An added bonus from this approach are visitor metrics that you can attribute to a specific campaign, version, ad, etc. These statistics are harder to develop if you use the same landing page every time.

The other mistake we see a lot is failing to identify a clear call to action. If a prospect has taken the time to scan your QR code, or clicked through on a link to your landing page, they demand your attention. These individuals are more important, at least at that point in time, than the rest of the people on your distribution list that didn't respond to your message at all.

Your marketing strategy worked! Be sure you take advantage by collecting a new bit of information from those who respond or by giving them ample opportunities to continue the conversation that they decided to start.  They took you up on your offer of additional content, so their level of interest is fairly high.

This action on your part doesn't necessarily have to happen only on the landing page. It may make sense to move certain customers or prospects into a pre-defined sequence of follow-up messages based upon the new knowledge you just acquired about their areas of interest.

Tracking Individuals

Linking individual customers to specific follow-up sequences naturally requires some sort of customer identification. This may be accomplished by collecting the information, such as an email address, on the landing page. Companies who ask for customer information before granting access to white papers or other resources employ this approach. Or you may utilize technologies such as PURLS to link the original outbound messages to customers. This too enables the marketer to track and record individual customer actions.

Not everyone will be ready to monitor the activity of individual customers or alter subsequent message strategy at such a fine level of detail. That's perfectly OK. Just be sure that no matter what, your messages, particularly those that are linked together in some way, are consistent, achieve your campaign objectives, and deliver on the promises made to the customers.