Wild Web Women at Santa Barbara Exeuctive Rountable spreading the gospel of web marketing and making friends in the print world!

As Lorrie mentioned in her previous blog post, we were out and about spreading the gospel of web marketing yesterday to small businesses owners and managers eager to launch into success in 2009!

In the process, I met Sean Russel, the director of mail and data services at V3 Printing. He told me a great story about venturing out to digital tech conference and being the only print guy in the room.

Well congratulations Print Guy – that earns you the honor of being a Web Marketing Therapy positive role model!

Now regardless of whether you think print media is alive, dead, dying or maybe just pulling a Weekend at Bernie’s, what you have to agree on is that challenging ourselves and our industries to learn and grow is pretty cool. And being able to embrace new trends and strategically adapting to changes in the environment is even cooler!

Now one reason we love the web is that it is simply the most trackable medium available to marketers.

So I got excited when Print Guy told me about a smart service his company offers that can help you track your direct mail campaign and integrate it into your multichannel marketing. In addition to personalizing your one-to-one communications thanks to digital printing, you can also include personal URLs in your direct mail pieces that take your potential clients to micro sites.

These personalized URLs allow you to track your DM campaigns so you can monitor customer activity and response rate! Combining DM marketing with web responses could be a very powerful way to reach your target audience.

Which means that direct mail is evolving, just like other forms of print media. We’ve seen newspapers embrace blogging and other web trends, like social bookmarking and user-generated content. So it’s exciting to think about the future of print media (almost as exciting as the future of the web!)

If your DM service provider isn’t offering you multichannel marketing services that help drive prospects to microsites featuring personalized URLs and relevant individual content, drop Sean Russell a line.

He’s the Print Guy whose been actively reaching out to the digital world and engaging web geeks like me in conversation. It looks like V3 is currently revamping their website, but I hope their new site will prominently showcase their personalized URL tracking service and all its benefits!

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