4 New Marketing Realities for 2014

Hope you are enjoying the post-holiday mountain of work on your desk! While you were out, a few trends have emerged. Looking ahead into 2014, here are 4 realities to consider before you tackle that mountainous back-log of work:

#1 - The mobile revolution will continue to gain steam. Your audiences (yes, you likely have more than just one audience) of donors, customers, prospects, or students are already expecting to be engaged through mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. According to most reports, more email is now read on mobile devices than on desktops. Nearly 75% of users will abandon sites if it takes longer than 5 seconds to load on a mobile device. Responsive design will continue to become the status quo due to its benefits of re-formatting content and decreasing load time. Don’t have the in-house expertise to do responsive design and mobile formatting? No problem, we’ve got you covered!

#2 - Postal rates are increasing. In terms of baby boomer and older adults (the bread and butter for most nonprofit’s larger donors), direct mail is still the preferred channel for giving. However, the USPS announced recently that rates will go up yet again. For First Class letter (1 oz) mail the rate will go up 3 cents to $0.49 per piece. Any standard letter above 1 oz will be charged 1 cent per additional ounce up to 21 cents. Bottom line – you will need to mail smarter in 2014 if you want to offset this postage increase.

The rate increase gives fundraisers and marketers even more reason to use target mailing tactics rather than “shot-gun” mailing. List acquisition is key to getting the most bang for your buck! You can read more about the USPS rate changes at: http://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2013/pr13_077.htm

#3 – Variable Content Marketing will become standard. We already know the power of 1-to-1 marketing. We also know that highly personalized and relevant communication yields an increased response rate. You will continue to see more and more organizations using variable-data printing and variable content in personalized microsites. This is partially a result of increased postage costs, and partially a result of advancing technology that makes smart marketing easier to adopt and more affordable. So make sure your communication plans involve speaking to your audiences where they are at and using more dynamic content that is tailored to each individual.

#4 - Multi-channel Marketing is even easier! Thanks to technological advances in many common CRM platforms, multi-channel marketing is even easier to implement for small-to-medium-sized organizations. If you have not executed a truly integrated multi-channel marketing campaign, this is your year! Even among Millennials and Gen-Xers, direct mail is still a critical channel to employ. However, it is best used in conjunction with other channels of engagement such as email, social media, mobile and online.

Many marketing service providers now offer integrated marketing services to help you communicate better across more channels at affordable costs. In some cases, you should consider reducing larger, single-channel marketing campaigns in favor of smaller, multi-channel efforts that will have greater impact on a more targeted group.