While marketing fulfillment might not be what most consumers talk about, it plays a crucial role in keeping their favorite companies at the top of their minds. Whether it’s timely emails from a student loan provider when you’re thinking about grad school or a pharmaceutical company quickly sending 10,000 patients booklets about the launch of a new blood pressure monitor device, marketing and fulfillment services show your customers you’re always thinking about their needs.
However, challenges like fragmented fulfillment, inventory mismanagement, and slow turnaround times are the three major challenges that can lead to unsatisfied customers and a low ROI. Fortunately, with the right technology and expertise, these issues can be resolved, transforming your marketing fulfillment services into a powerhouse that is hard to ignore.
In a Crowded Marketing Ecosystem, Marketing Fulfillment Helps Businesses Stand Out
The internet makes it easier for businesses to be accessible but harder to stand out. With 5.3 trillion display ads shown online yearly and people seeing 5,000 ads daily, digital ads can feel fleeting, often forgotten as quickly as they appear. To truly connect with overwhelmed consumers, incorporating physical marketing campaigns is essential. Holding a tangible product increases brand recall — 66% of consumers can name a brand from a logoed item they received in the last year. While physical marketing has its benefits, it also presents challenges that only the best marketing fulfillment services can effectively manage.
Three Challenges in Marketing Fulfillment
Complications are inevitable when servicing customers with unpredictable engagement habits in a constantly changing market. To ensure success, you need to mitigate the impact of these issues on your campaign's success by addressing these three preventable marketing fulfillment challenges.
Fragmented Processes
Businesses often make the mistake of managing complex marketing campaigns aimed at a large audience by working with multiple vendors for different fulfillment needs. Ensuring each vendor upholds the standard of quality as your company, communicates effectively with one another during the fulfillment process, and has compatible systems can take time away from you running your business. This approach can lead to inefficiencies, errors, and delays.
For example, if your packaging vendor experiences delays due to equipment issues but fails to communicate this to the shipping vendor, the latter will need to reschedule product pickups, resulting in shipment delays and unhappy customers. This can be especially disruptive to time-sensitive marketing strategies, such as promoting an event with a specific date or trying to capitalize on the holiday season. Any delay from marketing and fulfillment services could reduce customer engagement and possibly lead them to competitors.
Inventory Management Issues
Managing inventory levels requires the precision of a chef or a chemist, balancing just enough to meet campaign demands without creating a surplus or a deficit. Understocking and overstocking is particularly challenging in marketing fulfillment because you’re forecasting demand rather than responding to it. You might expect 2,000 attendees at a trade show to pick up a brochure, but only 1,000 show up. Factors like demand, branding change, and market shifts add unpredictability, making some level of overstocking and understocking inevitable.
Understocking can delay campaign launches until the company produces enough to distribute to target markets. Overstocking can add extra storage costs to account for excess inventory, hurting ROI. Maintaining optimal inventory levels at all times is key to ensuring campaign success.
Slow Turnaround Times
Marketing campaign success often hinges on timing, and slow marketing fulfillment services can create a domino effect of missed opportunities. The longer it takes to get your marketing materials out, the higher the chance of losing potential customers and causing delays by bottlenecking your fulfillment process. A flyer about Christmas sales arriving after Thanksgiving misses the key window when most Americans start holiday shopping in October, giving competitors a head start.
Delays also affect ROI, as companies may need to expedite deliveries to meet campaign deadlines. Missed marketing opportunities lead to lost revenue and can damage a brand’s image if customers perceive the company as being behind on trends. Ultimately, slow fulfillment can render a marketing campaign ineffective and set your company back.
Stand-Out Marketing Fulfillment Requires Innovation and Experience
You’re fortunate to run a business at a time when technology is solving traditional marketing fulfillment challenges. Integrated tech solutions streamline operations by offering real-time inventory management that alerts you to overstocking or understocking, providing data-driven insights to better target your audience, and automating time-consuming tasks like email campaigns. These tools get you in front of people before they realize they need what you’re promoting while giving you control over the entire process.
Despite technological advancements, industry experience remains invaluable. A marketing fulfillment company with extensive experience has likely encountered and resolved every possible issue, proactively addressing problems before they arise. Partnering with an experienced marketing fulfillment company lets you grow your business, confident that your logistics are smoothly handled by professionals with a track record of success.
Three Solutions to Overcome Marketing Fulfillment Challenges
While sometimes daunting, marketing fulfillment challenges don’t need to derail your campaign. With agile fulfillment that can produce and distribute as demand dictates, a centralized fulfillment system streamlining operations, and real-time insights into inventory levels, there are plenty of solutions to any logistical problem your campaign may encounter.
Centralized Fulfillment Strategy
Simplifying your marketing strategy by consolidating all fulfillment activities under one roof is the best way to minimize the risk of failure. A centralized fulfillment approach streamlines marketing operations by integrating essential tasks — such as order fulfillment, warehousing, and inventory tracking — into one system. This reduces miscommunication errors that often arise from using multiple disconnected vendors. It also ensures consistency in quality and messaging across different marketing channels, avoiding confusion caused by your flyers saying one thing and emails saying another. With a single point of contact, it becomes easier to get real-time updates on all facets of your marketing campaign, track performance, and quickly address issues in a timely fashion. Fewer cooks in the kitchen means a lower chance of one mistake ruining the entire meal.
Advanced Inventory Management System
Most marketing professionals will tell you that mismanaged inventory is a common cause of marketing campaigns missing deadlines, making a real-time inventory management system necessary. Knowing exactly how many marketing materials you have allows your campaign to be nimble and able to adjust as demand shifts. If you experience higher-than-expected demand for marketing materials about your newly launched cardiac implant devices, a precise inventory system will alert you as soon as stock is running low, allowing you to respond quickly to the demand and avoid losing potential customers to competitors.
If medical regulations changes force you to change your messaging, you won’t be sitting on massive amounts of outdated marketing material because you avoided overproduction, knowing exactly how much you needed to meet demand. You reduce costly waste that would lower your campaign ROI, maximize customer engagement, and avoid disruptions in the marketing timeline, all by eliminating the guesswork of managing your inventory.
Agile Fulfillment Processes
While sticking to a well-thought-out marketing strategy has its benefits, rarely does everything go according to plan. Demand can fluctuate daily, companies may release new products, and external forces can shift the market, like when COVID-19 forced every company to move their marketing efforts exclusively online. It’s no surprise that 64% of marketers say agile marketing is crucial for competitiveness.
The ability to adapt is key to earning customer loyalty by quickly meeting their needs. Customizing marketing collateral helps tailor materials to specific, real-time needs, while centralizing your fulfillment process online allows for faster collaboration among marketing channels and turnaround. Leveraging customer data ensures you can deliver what people want when they want it. Adopting agile fulfillment processes can boost ROI, with digital marketing teams using agile tactics reporting a 20-40% increase in revenue. Be adaptable, like water taking the shape of its container, and watch success flow in.
Jet Mail: Your Ally for Streamlined Marketing Fulfillment
Your marketing fulfillment strategy will determine if your company is able to stand out in a crowded market where over $268 billion dollars was spent in 2023 on digital advertising in the United States alone. Using multiple vendors can lead to slow turnaround times if they all don’t communicate with one another, reduced engagement due to fragmented quality of materials, and diminished ROI as a result of varying inventory systems causing overstocking or understocking. You need to streamline your marketing fulfillment by entrusting it with one company experienced to have market-tested solutions and agile enough to adapt to any changes.
That’s exactly why Jet Mail is the perfect choice for your marketing and fulfillment services. With a proven track record that spans over 25 years, Jet Mail can help you put print, mail, and fulfillment capabilities under one roof. Their Just-In-Time printing services use data-driven insights to ensure optimal stock levels. Your marketing campaign’s ROI can be maximized by their special kitting service, leveraging customer data to personalize messaging and packing solutions. They can distribute promotional materials to any territory you target using its global distribution network and manage it all with their web-to-print online marketing portal to simplify the process with transparency and customization.
Jet Mail is dedicated to taking the hassle out of marketing fulfillment so companies can focus on running their business, and they’re still around after more than 25 years. Talk to a marketing fulfillment expert today at Jet Mail and begin to stand out among the rest.
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