This was evidenced most clearly at last year’s PrintWeek Awards, where Lateral Group picked up top honours in our inaugural Cross-Media Company of the Year category. The group’s work on the Change4Life campaign for the Central Office of Information (COI) and the Department of Health provided ample evidence of how multichannel communications can produce powerfully effective results – at the time the COI lauded it as its most successful direct response campaign ever, and it exceeded expectations by 75%.

Hardly surprising, then, to find cross-media marketing applications are the focus of much attention across the industry. Market research and consulting business InfoTrends produced a report last November Capturing the Cross-Media Direct Marketing Opportunity that cited a whopping 10% compound annual growth rate in the space in the US. After surveying the requirements and plans of more than 700 advertising agencies and marketers, InfoTrends predicted the value of the market in providing cross-media software and solutions would grow from $3.2bn (£2bn) in 2009, to in excess of $5.1bn by 2014. The InfoTrends research also states that using multiple media types can improve response rates by up to 34% compared with using print alone – surely the sort of figure that’s enough to make most clients sit up and take notice.

However, this level of sophisticated targeting relies on good data, and the latest information from the DMA’s biennial Data Tracking study makes it clear that consumers are becoming ever more wary about who has access to their personal details, and why.

According to the survey, the number of consumers who say they are willing to provide their name, address and email when engaging with a brand online has dropped substantially over the past six months. Although 27% of respondents said they would always or frequently provide their details, there was a big jump in the number of people who would be unwilling to share any personal details whatsoever. The most important factor in deciding whether to share information – cited by 54% of those surveyed – was trust in the brand. Communisis and Equifax co-sponsored the survey, and Communisis Data Intelligence director Charles Ping described trust as "the Holy Grail of good marketing".

It’s clear that the cross-media marketing space is developing at a pace, and sophisticated new targeting techniques need to be married with evolving consumer habits and preferences. PrintWeek spoke to a variety of client companies about their plans and aspirations in this area.

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Boden
When Boden launched in 1991, its clothing range comprised of just eight items of menswear. Today the firm employs 800 staff and its range spans menswear, womenswear, children and baby clothing. On an average day, 12,500 parcels leave its Leicester warehouse, and the company now has international operations in the US, Germany and Austria.

Claire Gibbon, head of graphic design and production
"We have always coordinated our catalogue mailings with emails, but it’s only in the past two years that we have ramped up cross-media activity. We have mainly used a mixture of variable data printing to personalise catalogues and direct mail pieces.

However, recently we have combined personalised print with a personalised URL (PURL) campaign and social media tie-ins. We are also using QR codes for the first time next month due to a promotion by the US postal service, which is offering postal discounts for mailings in July and August if you print a QR code or PURL. We can track whoever uses the QR code, which will be interesting as we expect take-up to be low.

We have found that a combination approach to using cross-media works best, for example a personalised catalogue with personalised email. However, we are continually testing to see what works and how different groups of people react to different combinations. Due to the increased unit cost you need to be sure that the likely returns will be high enough to warrant the additional cost and complexity of the job.

In the future, we’ll use whatever works for each creative idea or campaign. It could be a new technique or just a new application of techniques we’ve used before.

For Boden, any cross-media supplier must have a good understanding of data. If a printer is going to add cross-media capabilities, I think they need to be totally committed and invest in the right staff to sell and handle that type of work."

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Matalan
The first Matalan opened in Preston in 1985. Today, the firm is approaching the landmark of 200 stores and sells a wide range of clothing and homewares from some 465,000m2 of retail space across the country. Customers can also shop online via its website.

Paul Dykes, print manager
"We use a whole raft of multichannel communications for every sort of campaign. Our monthly promotional brochure is followed up by emails highlighting offers, and we use strategic direct marketing with follow-up emails too. We’re driving brand recognition and specific offers to customers. We haven’t used PURLs as we tend to give online discount codes on the mailers. The use of 2D barcodes and things like that is something we’re looking at, we’re evaluating whether that sort of technique is viable for us in driving increased spend. Everything we do is about achieving a return on investment. We have just had all our trucks liveried so we effectively have a rolling 96-sheet campaign on all 150 of them. We’ll probably change the campaign on a quarterly basis."

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Screwfix
The Screwfix catalogue contains more than 18,000 products, and its 160-plus branches typically stock 10,000 of these. The company lays claim to being the UK’s largest multichannel supplier of trade tools, plumbing and electrical supplies, as well as bathrooms and kitchens. It despatches "tens of thousands" of parcels every week.

Derek Skeavington, print services manager
"We are involved with all the usual things, Facebook, YouTube and so on. It all interacts. We are driving people to our website and our stores. There’s a whole three-way process. Does the internet drive sales to retail? Does the internet drive mail order? Does a catalogue picked up in-store drive people to the website? It all works together. We’ve done some research on it whereby people will use the paper catalogue and then order via the internet. So while we don’t mail as many catalogues as we used to, because we are more targeted about who we send them to, builders will still often have a well-thumbed copy in their van because it’s so convenient for them.

Catalogues are mailed, catalogues are picked up in-store, and we use email campaigns for specific offers.
We’ve got to have the offer available in the medium our customers want, when they want it. For example, if a builder is working off the beaten track away from his home patch, he can text a code from his phone and it will tell him where his nearest Screwfix store is and how to get there. Customers can call a number and order goods and pay for them over the phone, and then pick them up at the store in 15 minutes – actually I did this myself last weekend!

If a builder wants a bunch of different items, they can be shipped to a specific store for collection, or delivered directly to his site. And through our website we also provide templates for invoicing with his name on it.

The culture at Screwfix is that we will use all the available technologies that help us serve our customers better. At some companies, you come across what I call ‘the anti-sales department’, so often. That’s not what we want to be. We go out of our way to make things as easy as possible for our customers."

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Everest
Everest has been supplying home improvement products for almost 50 years, and as well as its familiar double-glazing window and door products, its offering also spans other areas including solar panels, driveways and boilers. More than 2m households have bought the company’s products.

Paul Mitchell, head of insight and new business marketing
"We are different from a lot of other companies because when someone is buying home improvement products it’s a very different journey to, say, FMCG customers. An example is that directory advertising still works well for us, because people often want to deal with someone local for home products. We measure things very directly, whether it’s a door drop, a mailing or a website interaction. At the moment each bit of media works on its own, and the journey we’re going on is to change that. For example our door drops have specific offer codes, and the response mechanism is phone or coupon. Potentially we might use something like a QR codes for this sort of application, and QR codes are a lot of interest to us."