As I discussed in How to Drive Growth by Correctly Targeting Web Traffic at its highest level brand awareness can be divided into web traffic that you attract, rent, or own. Contacts that you attract, rent or own each have their own set of marketing channels.
First, a business employs marketing channels that will attract prospects to their business and the marketing channels where they rent access to someone else’s audience so that they ultimately become a prospect that the business now owns. In this category, because the business now owns the prospect’s contact information, they can continue to reach out to them with content and offers when and where they choose.
Email
This channel is one of the most popularly owned category channels since it costs virtually nothing to drip emails to the prospect continuously. As we discussed in Sales Acceleration Emails, not all emails will trigger an action in the prospect. You can appeal to one of the four buyer psychologies using a series of emails. In general, emails experience about a 25% open rate.
Mobile
When it comes to a channel that receives the best open rates, text messages, sometimes also called push notifications are the king with an incredibly high, 99%, open rate. Often companies will include an opt-in link such as a QR code the prospect can scan with a smartphone to accept an offer or discount and then the business will use the mobile number captured to later send text/push messages to announce special deals.
Fans/Followers
Most social media sites allow a person to follow a particular business or person. In this way, once the prospect opts in, the business can post updates that its fans or followers can see.
Subscribers
Once a prospect becomes a subscriber they gain access to your content that others may not have access. The content provides information the prospect wants access to, but the content may contain occasional calls to action to drive the prospect up your value ladder with special offers.
Catalog
Many retailers capture a customer’s physical and email address when they make their first purchase or offer a loyalty program to obtain the information. Once in the database, the business can send the customer either an online or printed catalog. Catalogs allow the customer to make phone or internet orders, and customers are often assigned a unique customer number to make the ordering process more manageable.
How can you incorporate more of the five marketing channels to make the most of the contacts that you already own?
