Symptom:
Corporate headquarters wants more direct control of our marketing efforts. However, each of the stores is used to having direct control over their marketing efforts, having separate mailing lists of about 1,000 customers E-Mail addresses. Headquarters is concerned about the individual stores causing degradation of the brand. This is causing a politically charged mess in the organization, and our group is in the middle. Help!

Diagnosis:
What you need is to create the illusion of branding freedom for your client stores, while maintaining brand integrity for the corporate office.

Remedy:
My recommendation is that you use EchoMail Direct. This is our template-driven direct marketing tool. Using this tool, you can create a direct marketing template, with a little help from our creative team, based on your corporate brand image.

Once the brand image has been designed, you can then distribute this template to your client stores with suggestions for their direct marketing pieces. They can use these pieces to create a unique store image while tying in their vision to the corporate brand. These marketing pieces can even be printed to a standard color printer to create mail pieces for customers not yet on E-Mail.

The advantages of this approach are simple. E-Mail is a cost-effective way to drive a direct marketing campaign. Often with E-Mail your Return on Investment (ROI) is higher, because for a large E-Mail campaign your cost per piece is often as low as $0.10. This allows the illusion of creative freedom that individuals wish to have in a large corporate environment without damaging brand integrity, thus removing a number of the political issues involved in a large organization. Additionally, use of products such as EchoMail Direct and the rest of the EchoMail suite allow you to better track the success of your E-Mail market campaign.

Do you have a question about E-Mail? If you have a question for Dr. E-Mail, you can contact him at Dr.E-Mail@EchoMail.com.