Do offline and online go hand in hand? Cross-channel and synergy effects of direct mailing and display advertising

Despite the rise of digital, direct mailing as a marketing communication tool remains relevant and widely applied in practice. Nevertheless, research into effectiveness online environment is scant. Key questions that remain entail how mails affect different offline consumer activity metrics throughout purchase funnel they interact with digital tools. The current paper, therefore, investigates these two by conducting studies. First, we focus on effect zip-code level upper, middle, lower performance over time analyzing quasi-experimental data from large European insurance firm. results reveal significantly influences channel (i.e., search clicking behavior), support cross-channel effects mailing. Moreover, shown to be effective funnel, both directly indirectly, positive net sales effect. Second, study joint display advertising field experiment same show synergy between advertising. Therefore, despite still serves an tool, itself combination marketing.