From the perspective of an internet marketer, it might seem like the world outside of online advertising doesn't exist.  If you try to stay up to date on the current trends you get the impression that everything is digital these days:  online ads… search advertising… RSS feeds… email.  It's important to keep the perspective when looking at the marketing industry as a whole.  If, like me, your marketing is primarily done in digital format, you're going to come from a digital perspective.  But there is a world outside of that digital market.

In fact, as some new numbers released by MarketingSherpa show, several offline, non-digital forms of advertising completely crush everything the online world has to offer… spend wise.

What form of overall advertising would you think receives the most money?  Something digital?  Nope.  Television?  Nope.  Newspapers?  Magazines?  Sponsorships?  Nope… Nope… and Nope.  The reining king of advertising remains direct postal mail.  That's right.  Old fashioned, snail mail advertising.  In fact, more money (almost $60 billion) is spend on direct mail advertising than all of the money invested in online forms of advertising.  What's more, 5 forms of offline marketing out-rank the total of online marketing.

So while you should most certainly be investing in online forms of marketing, which is slated to continue growing, don't forget there are certainly other ways of getting your message out.

In fact, for a practice case study of how a combination of off- and online marketing can lead to great success, continue reading.

B&B Electronics, a manufacturer of… you guessed it… electronics, had the difficult challenge of expanding their customer base of both offline and online prospects.  The company divided their customers into 5 different stages:

1. Prospect (someone who was just interested in possibly spending money)
2. Trier (someone who had made one purchase)
3. Buyer (someone who made a second purchase)
4. Customer (someone who made three or more purchases)
5. Dead/unworthy Accounts (someone who's email/postal mail was being returned)

B&B treated people at each stage a little differently, marketing wise.  They tried to give prospects as much information as possible without spending much money (because this is where the most money is lost).  Triers were sent future emails about additional B&B products and recieved a personal phone call from the company to check on the product's satisfaction.  B&B spent the most money on the buyers because, as they saw it, these were the people who might not consider B&B as a supplier yet, but they were teetering on the fence.  Customers were kept in contact with on a constant basis and, sometimes, B&B spent extra time deepening its relationship with these people.  If email or postal mail was being returned, the company would drop the name from its lists to save money.

The combined mediums used by B&B in reaching their various levels of customer include:  print catalogs, search engine ads, specialty search ads, direct postal mailing, banner ads, email newsletters, trade show booths, product information emails, telemarketing, and direct customer interaction.  Whew!  Did they cover the gamet there or what?

Results:  51% yearly growth of customer file; 15% conversion rate; $1300/year average per customer; a great relationship between the marketing department and the company's CFO