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Underwear merchant Bare Necessities recently tested coordinating a postcard campaign with e-mail to a segment of its customer file and saw a significant increase in revenue from those who received both messages.

As part of the effort, Bare Necessities selected 30,000 names from its six-figure e-mail database to receive postcards promoting a sale and timed the drop to coincide with an e-mail effort.

According to David Wauters, director of marketing for Bare Necessities, the company saw a 15% lift in revenue from customers who received the postcard and the e-mail, compared to the control group who received only the e-mail.

The company was a bricks and mortar retailer until 1998 when it launched BareNecessities.com. Previous to the postcard test, the company relied solely on e-mail for its retention efforts.

“There was a nice bump in response, not only during the sale, but after the sale, as well,” said Wauters. “We had never done direct mail to our Internet customers before. This was our first experiment using the two forms of media, and I’m sure there will be more.”

Wauters has apparently stumbled on something that a lot of marketers talk about, but few truly pull off. A relative few marketers truly coordinate their e-mail and print efforts, according to Jane Kaiser, president of online marketing consultancy Eclipse Direct Marketing.

She said her clients consistently see lifts of between 15% and 25% when they send coordinated print and e-mail campaigns.

However, she said, true multichannel campaigns are relatively rare.

“A lot of marketers think they’re doing multichannel marketing, but they’re not,” she said. “They’re marketing on multiple channels, but they’re not making sure the same person gets both pieces.”

She added that coordinated e-mail and print campaigns are fairly easy to pull off at small companies, but extremely difficult at large ones because of the barriers corporate politics generally present at large firms.

“At small companies, it’s a no-brainer, but it’s really hard at big corporations because they’re so siloed and the databases don’t talk to one another,” she said. “You have to get all these people into a room, and then there’s the question of who gets credit. If the catalog is going to get the credit, then the e-mail manager’s going to want to do something else. It’s why such a simple and logical concept is so difficult to pull off in large corporations.”

Kaiser added that coordinated e-mail and print campaigns work for prospecting just as well as they do for retention.

She said one of her large corporate clients saw a 30% lift in revenue in two coordinated print/e-mail prospecting efforts. Her contacts at the company were so impressed with the results that they planned to use them as ammunition to break down some of the barriers between channels in their retention efforts, she added.

However, said Kaiser, it’s been six months since the efforts and she hasn’t heard from them on any progress they may have made.

Kaiser added that the creative for coordinated efforts doesn’t have to be identical to work. “The message should be consistent,” she said. “It doesn’t need to be identical, but it should clearly be part of a set.”

Scott Olrich, chief marketing officer for Responsys, the firm that provides Bare Necessities’ e-mail marketing software, said the effects of true multichannel marketing also go beyond immediate campaigns.

“If you have a customer who is responding to both online and direct mail, their average spend with you will be 25% higher,” he said. “True multichannel marketing is being able to deliver the right marketing through several different channels in a sequenced fashion.”