7 FEATURES YOUR DISTRIBUTED MARKETING SOLUTION SHOULD HAVE
When choosing a distributed marketing solution, you have a lot of factors to consider. You need a tool that not only caters to your organization’s mission and objectives but fits within your company’s hierarchy – and offers all the necessary capabilities to help your local sales representatives do their jobs in the most time- and cost-efficient way possible. No matter which service you choose, here are seven features to look for when deciding on a distributed marketing tool.
1. eMarketing: Email marketing is one of the largest marketing channels used today. Whether you choose an on-demand or triggered marketing strategy, email should be a critical component of your overall strategy – and using a distributed marketing service that allows you to customize emails, quickly build time-sensitive campaigns and utilize triggers to send automated messages can help you to greatly improve your organization’s success with eMarketing. According to the Aberdeen Group, personalized emails can improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. Automated messaging has many benefits, too; businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experienced a 451% increase in qualified leads, according to The Annuitas Group.
2. Direct Mail: While some may consider direct mail to be lost in a sea of digital marketing efforts, it actually leads all forms of marketing in terms of ROI. That’s because customers enjoy tangible marketing – things they can touch and see. Fostering a personal relationship with a potential customer is crucial to the sales process; placing a tangible form of marketing in front of them can help keep your brand top of mind. With a good distributed marketing tool, corporate users can create custom direct mail templates featuring brand-compliant imagery and messaging that their local counterparts can easily customize. Pre-approved templates mean local direct mail pieces will always comply with brand guidelines, helping you to preserve your brand’s image. And with event-triggered marketing, you can reach your customers while saving up to 80% of your direct mail budget.
3. List Management: In business, time is money. Anywhere you can save time, you can save money – and list management is no exception. Maintaining a well-managed list of contacts in a centralized location will allow you to focus more of your time selling rather than updating your contacts. It can also help you to sell better. No matter how compelling your content is, if you’re marketing your message to the wrong audience, it won’t drive any results. A good distributed marketing tool can help you avoid all headaches related to list management. The right tool will help you segment your customer service lists, making it easy to create highly targeted contact lists for each marketing campaign. It can also help you save even more time by automatically filtering through old email addresses, duplicates and even undeliverable addresses.
4. Fulfillment Options: A good distributed marketing software should be able to provide diverse fulfillment solutions for your company. For example, for email services you should have the option to either send the email as HTML or attach the content as a PDF. And when it comes to fulfilling direct mail and other print pieces, whether your lead generation efforts are consumer-focused or business-to-business focused, the more options you have the better. Whether you want to fulfill the piece directly through a pre-approved vendor offered through the system, add your own third-party vendor to the system, or download the files for your customized project to your desktop and either send it to your own vendor or print in-house, the right distributed marketing tool should offer you access to all of these options. With the right system, you can tailor the fulfillment method of each job to match the size and needs of any campaign. Even better? When you use fulfillment options through your distributed marketing tool, you can often save money. For example, Conduit users can save up to 30% on production costs using the system’s pre-approved fulfillment solutions.
5. Promotional Marketing: Promotional marketing is an often-misused tool when placed into inexperienced hands. A good distributed marketing tool should make it easy to use promotional marketing, even for those with no experience. With a good tool you can create impressive, effective marketing and promotional pieces such as flyers, postcards, brochures, door hangers, business cards and more. With each project you can customize pricing, product or service description – anything you need to fit the local market. With access to pre-approved, easily customizable templates, your local sales teams will be empowered to provide customers with targeted, customized offers that don’t jeopardize brand guidelines. Protect your brand identity while still raising customer interest, influencing a purchase and making your company stand out amongst its competitors. Everyone benefits!
6. Reporting: If you don’t know how your campaigns are performing, how can you truly determine if your efforts were successful or not? That’s why every good distributed marketing tool should come with in-depth reporting features. With real-time reporting, your corporate offices can track the performance of individual users, templates or locations to get a better understanding of how campaigns are faring. Features such as dashboards, easily downloadable reports in a variety of formats (PDF, Excel, interactive), and automated report emails make it easy to share information with your company’s executives, analysts and stakeholders.
7. CRM Integration: Adopting a distributed marketing solution shouldn’t require you to ditch all of the other software systems you have in place. A good system will integrate with other software, such as your current CRM provider. By combining the familiarity of your current CRM with the increased capabilities of a distributed marketing system, you can supercharge your software, simplify your marketing process and enhance your marketing efforts overall. Imagine the possibilities if you could import prospect lists, set up and launch campaigns, document results and manage reports – all from one system.
Conduit: The Right Solution for Your Company
Not all distributed marketing systems will work for your business. Don’t settle for a system that offers an incomplete list of features or benefits. Whether you need diverse fulfillment options, in-depth reporting or easy-to-use email, promotional and direct marketing services, Conduit has the features that can help your business grow. Designed with your needs in mind, Conduit enables you to accelerate revenue growth and reduce marketing overhead by automating, monitoring and measuring your marketing and sales initiatives. If you want to give Conduit a risk-free test run and explore for yourself its full range of features, contact us today to start your 30-day free trial.