Josh Gordon, Director of Marketing at Knotice, discusses the importance of including a direct digital marketing strategy when developing a marketing plan.

The fragmentation of the marketing software provider landscape is well documented. As the number of digital capabilities and channels marketers have access to has increased over the past 15 years (a good thing), the provider landscape has become a jumbled mess of specialist providers (a bad thing). Marketers are forced to engage one solution provider for email, another for website improvements, another for mobile, yet another for data, and the list grows with each new channel or touch point. What consumers both crave and respond to – relevant communications – marketers are unable to coordinate across multiple channels and deliver… unless they are willing to take on the entire provider landscape and the complexity and expense that come along with it. 

What marketers need is a software partner and marketing approach capable of multi-channel campaign execution, built on a foundation of data.

Enter direct digital marketing. As defined by the American Marketing Association, direct digital marketing is, “a digital marketing method that provides relevant marketing communications that are addressable to a specific individual with an email address, a mobile phone number or a Web browser cookie. Traditional direct marketing uses an individual’s postal address. With the evolution of direct marketing to direct digital marketing, addressability comes in the form of three primary digital channels.”

Regardless of industry concentration, 2009 was a significant year for the growth and adoption of direct digital marketing.

The hospitality industry has used direct digital marketing to orchestrate easy online room upgrades during the booking process, to personalize a data-driven email program designed to educate and up-sell guests prior to their arrival, and to begin to unlock the promise of mobile with express check in and checkout and relevant text messages about the property during a stay.

The restaurant industry is using direct digital marketing, especially mobile marketing, to design customer friendly mobile programs and drive store foot traffic in real-time with incentives designed to boost sales volume immediately, not in a few days.

Retailers are using direct digital marketing to completely overhaul product launches, increasing sales by 25 percent. Mobile marketing is becoming increasingly popular within retail circles as well, either as an enhancement to a traditional campaign or to drive deeper engagement and improve the consumer experience.

The exciting developments across the entire marketing community in 2009 sets the stage for an exciting 2010. Two elements of direct digital marketing will see the most press and adoption in 2010.

First, direct digital marketing is unique because the content execution through the email, Web, and mobile channels takes place in the same software where the data is stored. The direct digital marketing data mart – better known as a universal profile management system – uses a Web service API to store known customer information like past purchase data and unique customer preferences AND capture behavioral information like keyword search activity and click path. The power of one database having so much information unlocks myriad segmentation possibilities and will be a highly sought after arrow in the marketing quiver.

 The second element of direct digital marketing that will see growth in 2010 is onsite targeting.  E-Commerce managers, for example, are eager to make improvements to the targeting and personalization of the content on their websites, but may not have the modern tools capable of helping them reach goals, or the resources to get them. Onsite targeting offers a simple approach to improving the relevance and personalization of content on a website without the cost of replatforming a website.

The ideal scenario of digital consumer engagement only seems elusive. Aligning the primary direct digital marketing channels is now not only a “can,” it is a must. To move beyond survival goals in 2010, the development of a direct digital marketing strategy must be the cornerstone of any marketing plan.

About the author: Josh Gordon is the Editor-in-Chief of the popular direct digital marketing blog The Lunch Pail and Director of Marketing at Knotice, a direct digital marketing solutions company. Contact Gordon at jgordon@knotice.com.