Integrating print, web and email

I believe that the key to success in any marketing campaign is integration of your look, feel and message across mediums, which constantly reinforces what you want your audience to get out of it. For example, a lot of people ask what day and time is best to send out email. It's the wrong question. Say you ask that at a conference and the speaker says "Tuesdays are the best day to send them out". Then everyone in the room starts sending them out on Tuesdays and it instantly becomes the worst day.  Specific time/day, in my opinion, just isn't that important.  What IS important is how you integrate it with every other part of that marketing campaign.

Here's an example of that. We just launched a fundraising challenge to get alumni to make their annual fund gift before the end of the fiscal year.  Below are some of the key marketing pieces: 

Print mail (Inside):



Home Page Promo:

(www.dartmouthcollegefund.org)

Challenge Landing Page:

(http://www.dartmouth.edu/~alfund/june_challenge/index.html)

The first (of many) segmented emails promoting the challenge:


Other lessons from this challenge:

1) When I was originally designing the landing page, I was REALLY worried that it would look too much like the print piece. The last thing I want is for a page to look like we just took a picture of the print piece and then slapped it up and called it a web page. At the same time though, I think consistency is very important. People may glance at the print piece or the promo or the landing page or the email, but if they all have the same look, feel and message, they'll still be mentally associating all of them and maybe gleaning a bit more each time they see one of the components.

2) A simple javascript ticker will make you look like a genius. I'm not kidding. When I first set it up, I was worried it would come across very cheesy...I still think its cheesy, but I also think its quirky and fun and works within the message (TIME IS RUNNING OUT!). If you're going to do it though, you have to go all out...when the idea was originally brought up, someone joked that it should be to the second but then consensus was that it should just be a countdown by day. I think expanding it and actually doing it to the second is what makes it cool.

3)Doing things like this requires you to be proactive. It's very difficult to pull it all together at the last minute. When you're relying on other people for content, this can be an extremely frustrating point. I'll admit, I about flipped out on a few people in trying to get all this stuff together.