We are big advocates of multichannel marketing. After all, what is email marketing but another way to communicate with prospects and customers?

Of course, there are qualities that make it quite unique, such as its cost effectiveness and its timeliness, but whether we’re getting subscribers from our websites, driving traffic to our blogs and order pages, or encouraging subscribers to visit our physical locations, email does our businesses its biggest favor in combination with other channels.

An Recent Example of Success

A recent article we found over at Direct Magazine (by way of Mark Brownlow) describes a good example of how one retailer used email with another channel to achieve a significantly improved sales response over just email.

In a controlled study, one group received both a card by postal mail along with an email, while the other received only email. The retailer, BareNecessities, found a 15% increase in their sales for the combined group over the email only group.

So, the coordinated postcard seems to have increased on the efforts of the email, and we might assume that the postcard would not have performed the same without the email.

Does A + B = More than C?

Beyond the ways the success of different channels tend to depend on one another (e.g. our blogs with syndication), these types of results beg a few questions in my mind:

• How much more can our businesses benefit when we execute a planned mix of different marketing touch points for a single, focused campaign?
• With a planned campaign working on a single goal, how much do the advantages of each individual channel used combine to reach a synergy, where the benefit of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts?
• Above and beyond simply using these channels, what methods — such as strong coordination that this article mentions — can we employ to maximize results?
• What role (or roles) does email tend to best play in the equation?

What formula has your business found the most success with? Please join the discussion in the comments.