Pat McGrew, Kodak's Data Center & Transaction Segment Evangelist has a blog post up on Grow Your Biz on making sure you don't alienate your customers that are not online:
The folks at the New York Times pushed a story about the decline in Broadband subscriptions. Another story from a couple of months ago at Parks Associates notes that one if five households has never used email and never looked for information on the internet.
For billers and statement producers this is mission critical information. Especially those who think that e-delivery of bills, statements and regulatory information is going to be their path to saving money. If you can't reach 20% of your customers, then you have a real challenge. And just because someone is web-enabled doesn't mean they want to give up their paper bills. Instead, they may be willing to looks at bills on line and even pay their bills on line, but most of the surveys indicate that even those who get bills online want that paper bill as well.
I tend to agree. For example, I view almost all my monthly statements electronically. However, I like to review my year end spending reports in print. None of my financial service providers have this as an option. It's all digital or all print. Seems like a lost opportunity to me.
Discussion
By Philippe Cardyn on Aug 21, 2008
I fail to see what this has to do with online marketing? The blog post you refer to continues about the marketing part, but that is what you have left out. Please make the subject line relevant to the point you're making
By Adam Dewitz on Aug 21, 2008
The point is to go read Pat's blog post.
By max on Aug 22, 2008
So what's new?
By Pat McGrew, EDP on Aug 22, 2008
Max! Can I try to answer.. nothing is really new to me, and perhpas not to you. But we constantly encounter professional marketers in brand agencies and in our customer's organizations who fail to include the print component in their customer communication strategies.
When we ask "Why?" the answer that comes back seems to relate to some idea that print is going away and all that will remain is e-delivery of essential mail to a computer, a phone or a PDA.
My point was that it's not possible to eliminate print and meet the obligation of communication.
Pat
By Michael Josefowicz on Aug 22, 2008
my 2 cents.
When the problem is to communicate to your most valued customers at the top of the pyramid, the web is a "must have", and print is a "nice to have".
When the problem is to communicate with everyone, at the middle and bottom of the pyramid, then print is a "must have" and the web is only now moving from "nice to have" to absolutely necessary.
One way to think about this is to look for communicators that have to speak to everyone.
Education? Public Health? Government? Politics?
By Bob Raus on Aug 25, 2008
Communicating with customers via the web is a must-have. However, it is clear that today the majority of older baby boomers (i.e. the ones who have a large portion of the wealth) prefer paper communications - and in many cases large print paper communications.
There are many major opportunities for print today and the Internet is another way to get data, just like cell phones are another way to make calls. So many disruptive technologies were predicted to replace older technologies - and while they did take a bite form the older technologies, in nearly every case they were additive to the overall market. How many people have both cell phones and land lines, VCRs and DVDs, DVDs and Blue Ray, microwave and conventional ovens, fax machines and multi-function copy/printer/faxes, etc...