Understanding Tactical Marketing Automation to Improve Results

Welcome to the Dove Direct Print and Marketing Blog. Today's post, "Understanding Tactical Marketing Automation to Improve Results," speaks to a new aspect defining a marketing strategy to improve marketing results when combining tactical marketing automation (TMA) with multichannel or omnichannel marketing strategies.  This post will uncover what TMA is, what it can accomplish, and how to leverage its use through best practices for a more effective and efficient marketing effort.  In recent surveys and posts from marketing teams and brands, we have heard that digital marketing is under the gun, so much so that only 50% of the online users see the ad posts.  The AMA ( American Marketing Association) has also recently estimated that audiences are subject to being invaded by 10,000 marketing impressions per day.  That number alone could be a huge reason why digital marketing, on the whole from a compelling perspective, is on the decline.

Our Quote of the Day: "Marketing automation is the technology that propels your business into a new era of relationship based marketing with quantifiable results. When powerful technology meets effective implementation and internal process management, your company will soon find itself on a journey that leads to new heights of business success." — Jon Miller.

Digital Engagement Declining

B2B marketing efforts are suffering due to the onslaught of increasing digital noise levels throughout an electronic landscape.  As stated in previous posts, the digital noise we are referencing is a direct result of the pandemic effects, the lockdown, new spikes in infections, and the rise of yet more new variants such as the Lambda and Mu.  Therefore, don't expect the digital noise to abate anytime soon.

We also stated that with new challenges come new opportunities.  In this instance, Oracle created a unique Spark Series designed to educate marketers on the benefits of defining physical marketing techniques driven in motion by audience behavior.  This approach is a methodology that raises marketing efforts above the cluttered digital ocean in a sea teeming with 10,000 daily marketing messages.  And now, there is a new category entitled Tactile Marketing Automation (TMA), and it connects the digital and physical worlds to bring about heightened results.

TMA Defined

What exactly is TMA?  TMA, by definition, is the integration of direct mail with a marketing automation platform or CRM.  Yes, we've heard of the integration of direct mail marketing with digital campaigns before. However, TMA is the next step in balancing marketing efforts between digital and direct mail strategies and solidifying a more integrated multichannel approach concerning automated marketing campaigns.

For starters, TMA is integrated natively with current marketing tools brands and marketers are already using, such as Salesforce, Marketo, Oracle, and others.  The TMA process allows marketers to send their prospects and customers precisely targeted, trackable, personalized direct mail collateral based on digital behavior usage. The data reveals that relevant orchestrated marketing campaigns that integrate tactile elements produce, on average, a 5x higher return over using only digital marketing.

Why TMA is the Choice Route

As we stated earlier, audiences can expect to see 10,000 advertising messages per day, which supports the claim of folks receiving a torrential downpour in their social media feeds overflowing with branded and advertising content.  Contrast the effect of determining which digital advertisement makes sense to click on, instead of receiving a personalized physical piece of collateral in a personal mailbox that will stand out and demand attention due to the singular nature of not having to compete with the significant amount of digital overflow.

To put a finer point on it, research from Millward Brown demonstrated that objects that can be touched, felt, and held evoke emotional processing at a higher level, which triggers a much deeper footprint in the brain versus digital messages that are limited to screen viewing.  Marketing efforts still include creating mindshare for the brand or product, which equates to brand equity.  The aspect of a physical item is key to developing an elevated memorable experience that will translate into better brand recall, which lends itself to improving an overall positive brand experience.

Further, PFL and Demand Metric research suggests that 52% of marketers reported a moderate to significant improvement in campaign performance metrics when their multichannel mix included high-impact, personalized direct mail marketing efforts. That said, it's a bit more complicated than influencing audiences to take a step back from their social media habits, such as deciding which button to click, from Like, Love, Avoid, Block, Ignore, and Delete behaviors that are now the norm.  Sending out generic direct mail campaigns will not get the audience behavior needle to move.

Successful TMA Campaigns and Key Components

To create memorable and effective campaigns, marketers must infuse direct mail into the customer journey at the right time to complement digital interactions, delivering a personalized holistic experience. 

TMA leverages the same technologies that power relevant, timely experiences in the digital realm to deliver effective direct mail campaigns, including integration, personalization, and measureability.

Integration
The backbone behind TMA ties directly to integrating relationship management and marketing automation platforms. CRM and Mar-Tech, for example, can produce insights depicting the entire customer journey, which in turn can deliver those real-time insights to help construct campaigns that solve those problems identified by that insight data. In addition, TMA can direct mail deliveries in conjunction with other marketing efforts, ranging from email campaigns to executive sales meetings to ebook downloads, digital purchases to trade shows, both physical and hybrid.

Personalization
Personalization can now dive much deeper, thanks to data collection.  Consumers are now of the mindset that brands should demonstrate specific relevance addressing individual needs and situations. A Demand Gen survey recently uncovered that 97% of B2B buyers stated that content tailored to their company mattered, and another 96% said they sought proof of expertise addressing industry-specific needs. The TMA process allows brands to deliver on a specific interest or intent and target a company's industry, including individual roles within an organization, which helps maximize relevancy by incorporating delivery times to either a single or recurring event(s).

Measurability
The marketing community was all abuzz with how digital marketing provided the best ad tracking and marketing results in recent years.  However, TMA can achieve so much more.  TMA can track physical marketing materials' delivery, engagement, and performance, including digital display ads, video, or email campaigns.  Further, with TMA tracking and measuring direct mail marketing response rates and integrating them into a universal marketing dashboard, brands can now discern and understand the impact physical marketing campaigns achieve when examining the numbers of the complete marketing campaign efforts.

This question becomes relatively simple. Would you prefer to do digital-only or combine the printed tactical collateral of direct mail into the mix?  The numbers don't lie. The combo mix makes TMA a powerful game-changer as opposed to using digital-only campaigns. AMA/DMA found that tactile marketing collateral can lift 184x greater response rates than online display ads, not to mention 36x greater than email or paid search for marketing teams!

A Best Practice Example

According to the numbers from the surveys in this article, here is an example that makes sense. Your brand provides lettershop and fulfillment. Start by sending out a branded package to your best prospects in a personalized marketing communication along with a gift card,, or special discount coupon.  Every time a package is delivered, the account sales executive assigned to that prospect would have received notification that the package was received and can therefore follow up promptly. These numbers, as mentioned above, indicate that response rates would increase.

The Net-Net

The TMA process is leveraging the combination of AI marketing automation and direct mail's variable data printing technology, which will yield higher response rates, better ROI, and improved brand recall when used simultaneously in a marketing campaign. Thanks for reading "Understanding Tactical Marketing Automation to Improve Results."

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