Adaptive Marketing Strategies During the COVID Crisis

Adaptive Marketing Strategies During Covid 19

How We Helped a Client Think Outside of the Box to Reach their Perfect Prospects at Home

COVID-19 has thrown businesses for a loop, but there are still jobs to be done and innovations to be made.

Let’s talk about the spectrum of what we’ve been seeing.

At Strata, we’ve seen the success of certain marketing campaigns ebb as some business temporarily halt marketing operations. The explanation for that one is pretty obvious — if you’re not marketing, you get no return.

We’ve also seen some business remain stable for other customers, like those primarily marketing through digital channels. As we touched on here, email and digital marketing are remaining relatively consistent and in some cases, experiencing positive trends.

And then we’ve also seen some increase during the COVID crisis, like a recent B2B direct mail campaign, which might surprise you. With a B2C direct mail campaign, people are home and opening their mail, so it would make sense to experience an uptick in return in a B2C direct mail campaign response rate.

But with people out of office, could a B2B direct mail campaign really be experiencing success?

The answer is yes. Thanks to our adaptive strategies at Strata, that’s exactly what happened. In fact, one campaign that’s expected to performed better than both industry and personal benchmarks.

Here’s how.

An Idea and a Survey

Our team realized that with decision makers working remotely, B2B direct mail campaigns would fall short, likely reaching their intended recipients too late — or not at all.

To get around this, we pulled data from our B2B data base, identified the decision makers, then matched it against a mailing list used by B2C businesses. This matching revealed the personal addresses of the decision makers, allowing us to send them B2B communications as if it were a B2C direct mail interaction.

This presented an obvious question: if we were to send decision makers B2B marketing materials directly to their homes, would they take this initiative as an invasion of privacy?

We sent a survey to IT professionals and executives focused around that exact question. We found that the overwhelming majority would not mind business materials being sent to their home given the current crisis.

Implementation

Once we had this information, the next step was to implement the strategy.

Our campaign consisted of highly-personalized dimensional mail boxes sent via mail directly to the homes of top B2B decision makers. Of those that received the campaign mailer, we’ve seen very promising clickthrough rates and an upwards tick in scheduled appointments.

We plan to update this post once final results for this campaign are available.

The Takeaway

In the worst of times, successful businesses find ways to adapt and overcome.

Let the above serve as a real-life demonstration. It’s a reality we’ve been harping on since the beginning of this blog program (and certainly since the beginning of the COVID crisis) — the absolute importance of adaptive marketing.

Want to put Strata’s adaptive marketing solutions to work for you? Contact us to see how we can do to help your business thrive as we get through these difficult times.

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