The new Marketing section in your Fieldwork account enables you to create Mass Email Campaigns for your existing contacts and also tracks Direct Mail Marketing Campaigns for new leads.
Choosing the best communication method (email vs. direct mail) is most dependent on the Return On Investment (ROI) and overall effectiveness as it relates to your target market.
Now that creating email campaigns is included in your Fieldwork subscription, the investment is simply your time spent creating the content for each campaign. The ROI would be calculated by the total sum of new or increased revenue generated from your email campaign divided by the total number of minutes or hours you spent creating & writing the email. It seems to me that the risk is low and the reward is high for sending out your first Fieldwork Email Campaign!
So now that we have identified that the ROI for email campaigns is outstanding, we need to answer the question, “How much more effective is an email campaign than a direct-mail campaign?”. In my opinion, this answer will depend on your specific target market and their communication preference.
I think you will find that some of your customers may prefer a postcard, a letter or door-hanger — these also may be the same people that hate email and forget to check their inbox for months. Yet, other customers may never open mail (unless it looks like a birthday card) or only enter the house through the garage and they often love their smartphone — communicating with this population is best done through digital marketing.
Information based on studies that compared the two methods all lean towards Email-Only campaigns if you HAD to choose one or the other and that is because email campaigns out-perform their counter-part in terms of the ROI. The costs of a Direct Mail campaign adds up quickly when you total up the costs of postage, printing and design.
However, if you don’t have to choose one over the other and you can identify what sector of your target market responds well to email and what sector response well to direct mail, a combination of both will yield an even better ROI than just one or the other.
To improve how the email and direct-mail campaigns function, we added new features in Fieldwork to help you manage the Marketing component to your business.
- Smart Folders (in Settings under Company Information). Enable this feature to improve Customer and Document organization on all screen (isolate specific dates and search specific customers & document numbers)
- Tags (in Settings under Company Setup). Create new tags and apply them directly to the Customer records to group customers by type, service frequency, target pest, etc. Your existing Customer types were transferred to tags and new tags can be easily created by clicking the New Tag button.
- Marketing Campaign selector in the Edit Customer and New Customer form. Manage and report on all new customers based on referral or campaign source.
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