What is growth marketing?
First, let’s talk about a traditional marketing approach. Typically, marketing is very concentrated at the top of the sales funnel, with activity focusing on awareness and acquisition. Strategies involve setting something up, running it until the budget runs out and then moving on to whatever’s next – it’s a model built on isolated campaigns. While this is often effective for customer acquisition and brand awareness, it’s always going to be limited to short-term effects.
Growth marketing is about going beyond the top of the funnel. Rather than focusing on just acquisition and awareness; it factors in engagement, retention and advocacy. It requires a much more data driven, experimental and fluid attitude to marketing, a constant process of inform, test, track, learn and optimise. Rather than seeing marketing as a series of isolated campaigns, it’s about a holistic long-term approach.
Growth marketing direct mail.
Direct mail is often seen as a more traditional marketing channel, but with the right partner it’s ideal for growth marketing.
Firstly, it’s heavily informed by data, with many different fully GDPR compliant options available. You can identify people who have bought similar products to yours, find people who have a particular interest, and use profiled data like Mosaic and Acorn to target specific demographics. At PSE, we also have our own real-world database, something we call PSE Wisdom. It’s basically all our expertise, experience combined into a giant shared brain that is packed full of real-world data to draw insights from.
Data isn’t just important at the start of growth marketing, it’s also vital for constantly evolving your activity and going beyond just the short-term impact. Using A/B testing, unique tracking codes, matchback reporting, phone numbers and landing pages, we can know what’s working and what’s not. We can even track when, how and even who acted on your direct mail campaign. Doing this gives pinpoint accuracy – from viewing and response rates, through to conversion rates and cost per acquisition. This is how you get to evolve your strategy, gaining a better understand your audiences’ relationships with your brand and what they will respond to best in order to move from prospect, to customer, to loyal customer to ambassador.
Direct mail is key for engaging and retaining customers. In an increasingly digital world, having something tangible in their hands interrupts a person’s day and grabs their attention. It allows you to do something creative, free from overly restrictive character limits, images sizes etc. It can also be responsive to a person’s activity. At PSE we use programmatic direct mail, which sends out a direct mail piece automatically triggered by a digital event, typically an abandoned basket. This is a super effective way at re-engaging a customer and is a great demonstration of a more holistic, growth marketing led approach.
Direct mail is the perfect tool for retention and engagement, emails are easily ignored, but something physical through the door, or even better an insert in another brands distribution, is a great way to provoke a response. 92% of Direct Mail is opened and has an average lifespan of 17 days on view in a household, that’s a very unique attribute that lends itself way to retention and engagement.
While we could write plenty more about our growth marketing approach to marketing, it can be summed up simply by stating that we approach everything with a long-term frame of mind. Many marketing partners are so worried about the short term, they put too much emphasis on early transactions to prove their worth. While this is obviously good in the short-term, it can lead to ineffectiveness and inefficiencies moving forward. In crude terms; we would rather deliver a few 6/10 campaigns to be able to then deliver a 10/10 campaign, than to only ever be able to deliver 7/10 campaigns.
We can help
If you’re looking for a marketing partner that goes beyond the short-term and can help you achieve your growth marketing goals across your entire customer journey, then get in touch with us today and find out how we can work together.
