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Offline marketing communications

Offline communications will never disappear – they are effective at reaching an audience to 

encourage them to visit a site, but are also useful as a way of having an impact or explaining 

a complex proposition, as Mini case study 9.7 shows.

House list

A list of prospect and 

customer names, email 

addresses and profile 

information owned by an 

organisation.

Social media 

marketing

Monitoring and facilitating 

 customer–  customer 

interaction and 

participation throughout 

the web to encourage 

positive engagement 

with a company and its 

brands. Interactions may 

occur on a company site, 

social networks and other 

 third‑  party  sites.

Viral marketing

Email is used to transmit 

a promotional message 

to another potential 

customer.

Mini Case Study 9.7

UK‑based online dating company Match.com has over 1.5 million members and in 2004 was responsible for 

200,000 marriages around the world. Match.com and partner company uDate.com compete against Yahoo! 

Personals, Dating Direct, traditional players and a host of smaller players. Given the intense competition, 

Samantha Bedford, UK MD believes it is essential to invest in offline communications for continued growth. 

In Autumn 2005, Match.com spent over £3 million on a TV advertising campaign since they wanted to gen‑

erate brand awareness, given that they estimated that by 2008 the value of the online dating market would 

double. In addition to achieving reach and brand awareness, offline advertising is important because it ena‑

bles Match.com to communicate a fairly complex message to potential customers. Focus groups showed 

that many singles felt they didn’t need an online dating service and didn’t realise how Match.com could help 

as part of the overall dating experience.

Source: New Media Age (2005b).

Offline communications vital for finding the perfect partner at 

Match.com

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Part 2  Strategy and applications

   Table   9.3    gives a summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the digital media channels dis-

cussed in this chapter (numbers reference the different boxes in  Figure   1.8   ).  

    

  Customer  retention  management 

 For an e-commerce site, customer retention has two distinct goals: 

   1 

  To retain customers of the organisation (repeat customers).  

  2 

  To keep customers using the online channel (repeat visits).   

 These are similar to the two aims of customer acquisition as described in a previous section. 

Ideally marketing communications should address both aims. 

  Customer  retention  management