Offline marketing of online services

Using snail-mail for marketing is an effective strategy for it grabs more of your attention. But messages need to be more personalised to have effect.

This came in the mail yesterday. If you are an old-timer like me, you will recognise it as an “inland letter card”. The edges are frayed because it had been so long since I’d received one such card that I’ve forgotten how to open them.

bigbasket

You will notice that this inland letter came from Bigbasket, the online grocery shopping firm. At first look, it is bizarre that an e-commerce firm is using snail mail for its marketing. On second thoughts, though, it isn’t that bizarre!

The thing with online modes of communication such as email or SMS is that the cost of sending a message is low, very close to zero. What this leads marketers to do is to bombard you with messages. For example, I bought something from Jabong a couple of weeks back and they’ve since sent me at least an SMS a day. I promptly delete them without reading. On my email, I’ve been unsubscribing wherever possible from promotional lists from which I get messages – for they are too frequent and too “vanilla” (it’s bizarre that even marketers who know much about me refuse to use that information in their communication).

In short, there is too much clutter in online (email/SMS) marketing, and the chances of any promotion really standing out and getting the user’s attention is minuscule.

Sending snail-mail, on the other hand, is expensive. It costs you to buy the paper, print out the letters and then you pay for postage. This means that with the advent of cheaper means of communication, most marketers have moved away from it. What that has done is that you get much lesser snail-mail than you used to a few years ago. Which means that the amount of attention you devote to each snail-mail is actually more!

So with snail-mail being the more expensive form of marketing, it is actually more effective for marketers because it draws your attention! (You can think of it as a multi-player prisoner’s dilemma where the marketer wants to maximise her claim on your attention (relative to her costs), and can do so by either using email or snail-mail. The optimal solution, I believe, is a kind of “mixed strategy” – mostly email, but the odd snail-mail here!)

So an online sales company reaching out to you by snail mail is not that bizarre after all. If only they had customised the mail to put my name on it (not hard to do at all), and made it seem like a personal letter, it would have been even more effective!

There have been two occasions in the last five years when I’ve actually responded to upsell campaigns. One was by Airtel who called and offered me a 3G data plan for almost the same price as what I was then paying for my 2G plan. I had been intending to upgrade and I took it.

The other was by Tata Sky, who sent me a beautifully crafted personalised letter printed on thick A4 paper, indicating I was a “premium subscriber” and asking if I wanted to upgrade to Tata Sky+ HD, and giving me a number of a dedicated call center who I had to call to upgrade. It is likely that had it been email I might have discarded it (or if I were using today’s Inbox, marked it as “Done”). Snail mail drew more attention, and the personalisation made me feel good. And I upgraded.

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