There’s been some talk recently about a story in the Wall Street Journal and it’s worth repeating to anyone else who’s interested in marketing.

Here Goes…

Sometime about a year ago a woman named Alicia Settle was a CEO and looking for ways to cut back on marketing costs. At this point she knew all of the bonus’ and advancements in online marketing and email marketing. She decided then to cut back on some of her “old-school” marketing techniques and place all her money and efforts primarily on email marketing.

Until then she’d been spending more than $20,000/year on the “old” way of generating traffic so the cut made a big difference in her budget! She was confident and excited until she checked out her quarterly reports when they came in and was shocked to see that sales were down 25%!

Imagine how surprised she was? At first she thought that it was due to the recession, and things must be worse off than she previously imagined. But…she was able to narrow down on the actual problem. She lost 25% of her sales because she dropped this “old-school” marketing and traffic source. What did she say about that? “We realized we had made a HUGE mistake.”

She’s not alone – many companies have dropped this way of marketing because they think it’s too old, not effective, or too expensive.
Fast-forward to June of the same year, she re-opened this marketing channel and almost immediately got back the 25% she had lost!

What did she ditch? … Offline marketing!

But it’s not necessarily the direct mail that we’ve all become so accustomed to in the past (i.e. massive amounts of fliers to a random list). Like all marketing methods , direct mail has evolved too, and the bar has been raised. The result is marketers spending more time to deliver personalized and more valuable content (something more appealing than junk mail).

Moral of the story? Don’t discount older marketing methods, instead breathe new life into them! The truth is, leaving them out could cut a hole in your business and ignoring could be preventing you from realizing your potential.

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