How To Select The Right Direct Mail Offer

Check your mailbox now. Do you have something that is not a bill or junk mail? It could be a postcard or a letter with an exclusive offer from a local business. That is something we often call direct mail offers.

Businesses prefer running direct mail offers with higher ROI and response rates. Only amusing and engaging deals help in achieving goals. At the same time, the not-so-interesting ones result in vague marketing.

Both the sales and marketing teams must understand the depth of this topic to develop the best direct mail marketing campaigns.

The ideal direct mail offers and appropriate timing will help you lure your target audience. Snail mail is effective for attracting both seniors and millennials. Around 77% of millennials pay more attention to direct mail ads than digital ones.

You might say that direct mail is obsolete with the rise of digital marketing. Yet, advertising direct mail still has vast potential in the marketing world. In this blog, you will learn what direct mail offers are, how they work, and why businesses still use them today.

So, whether you are a business owner, marketing lead, or sales professional, this blog post will help you learn how to implement the best direct mail marketing campaigns.

What do you understand by the offer part in the term “direct mail offers”?

Let us find out!

Your best direct mail offers will depend on the application and use case;

Lead Generation Offers 

Businesses launch these direct mail offers to easily make their recipients show interest in their products or services. Newsletters, postcards, information kits, special reports, and invitations to webinars or seminars are ideal for lead generation.

Order Generation Offers 

These direct mail offers are paying offers. While responding to these offers, people must use their credit cards or checks or commit to paying later.

Continuity Offers 

These direct mail offers are ideal for businesses that sell products every month. For example, gym or health clubs, book club memberships, or magazine subscriptions. Companies often launch free trials for a limited time.

Traffic Building Offers 

Retailers often prefer these direct mail offers to increase the footfall of customers in their stores. Free event promotions or discount coupons are the best strategies that come under these offers.

Fundraising Offers 

It might not sound like a marketing campaign for businesses. You are asking for a donation to sustain your cause. The donors will only relish a feeling of satisfaction from your offer. You can provide additional fundraising promotions or incentives through gifts or premiums.

There’s Nothing Like a Strong Offer: Myth Debunked 

We often hear the common term “strong offer.” It usually defines an offer that can generate a great response rate. You can use the phrase to show that one direct mail offer is superior. Yet, this is only sometimes true.

You must know that an offer with a high response rate will likely produce low-quality leads. It is not a worthwhile goal for any business. As a marketer or sales professional, you must focus on generating an excellent response rate for a campaign with the best direct mail offers.

You need to drive quality leads into your business instead of quantity. Handling huge and unreasonable portions will only waste time and resources.

Why bother to add offers to your direct mail pieces?

Adding offers to your snail mail pieces could be a great way to boost your response rates and motivate recipients to take some action. Here’s why you should add direct mail offers in your next campaign;

Encouraging People to Take Action 

Let’s face it people need to be more active when responding to emails or direct mail. They need some motivation factor to take action on these marketing pieces.

Whether making a purchase, visiting your website, or calling your business, you must provide a clear incentive to make them act. People love to explore good deals that can nudge them to take steps on your direct mail piece. Thus, it becomes vital to consider adding the best direct mail offers to your physical mail piece.

Standing Out From the Crowd 

Are you sending generic marketing messages through direct mail? Having a well-crafted direct mail piece with a great offer can help you stand out from the crowd. The ideal offer can make it more eye-catching and create a sense of exclusivity among recipients.

Increasing Engagement with Your Brand 

Every business wants to increase its engagement levels to ensure smoother customer conversions. Adding direct mail offers increases the possibilities of increasing engagement with your business. Recipients redeeming offers can become repeat customers and recommend your products or services to others.

You can also track these redemptions to learn what’s working (and what’s not) in your marketing efforts.

Develop a Sense of Urgency 

Most people are procrastinators when it comes to taking action. You can avoid such situations by creating a sense of urgency with limited-period direct mail offers.

Expiration dates on your mail pieces can encourage the recipients to act faster. When people understand that they have limited time to do something, they are more likely to prioritize it over other things.

Provide Better Value 

Your prospects and customers are looking for better value in the market. Using the best direct mail offers is a great way to provide a higher value to your target audience.

Whether providing a special discount, gift, or exclusive access to something, offers let you create a more concrete impression of your brand.

Better Personalize Your Message 

The best direct mail offers can also help you to personalize your marketing message. You can tailor it according to specific audiences. For example, you can provide an additional discount on a product or service for specific demographics.

Boosting Your Return on Investment 

Adding direct mail offers to your mail pieces can help you cost-effectively ensure higher ROI. More people showing interest in your offerings can generate higher sales and revenue from your marketing campaigns.

Encouraging Referrals 

Using direct mail offers can also be a great way to increase referrals for your business. For example, you can launch a loyalty program that offers exclusive discounts to customers who refer your organization to others.

Upon every successful referral, you can award them with good incentives. It would help you expand your customer base and bring new business without spending anything on advertising.

Increasing Brand Awareness 

Market recognition is vital for the growth of any business. Compelling offers in your direct mail pieces can also boost your brand awareness efforts. Even if your prospects don’t take advantage of these offers, they will remember your brand. They are more likely to consider your offerings in the future.

So, many reasons exist to consider adding direct mail offers to your mail pieces. Yet, you might not know about the best practices to implement in your campaign.

Snail mail marketing gives you an open-ended and creative space to implement your ideas. Yet, it is crucial to follow a few tips and best practices to ensure your campaign’s effectiveness; 

• Keep your direct mail piece minimalistic and clutter-free. 
• Consider using clear and easy-to-read fonts. 
• Make your CTA the central point of your mail piece. 
• Learn about your audience to tailor your message for them. 
• Consider running tests before launching your entire campaign. 
• You must proofread and edit your marketing materials before sending them for printing. 
• Always send follow-up messages. 
• Include a scannable QR code or link to drive traffic to your website.

Direct mail offers that financial advisors often suggest the best strategies to engage with your target audience. Yet, developing an irresistible deal or promotion requires a step-by-step approach. Here are some tips that you should consider following;

Learn About Your Audience 

Understanding your target audience is the first thing you must do to craft the best direct mail offers. You must conduct proper research to learn about their demographics, pain points, preferences, and buying habits. For example, your target audience might be school students seeking scholarships and career advice.

Provide a Clear Benefit 

Your prospects won’t have any interest in learning about the features of your product or service. Instead, they are looking at how it will benefit them. Include an offer that gives a clear and compelling benefit to the recipient. Ensure that people can easily understand the deal and acknowledge its value. For example, “10% discount on all items” to encourage people to take action instantly.

Create a Sense of Urgency 

Include a deadline or expiration date in your direct mail to encourage them to act swiftly. You can create a sense of urgency and motivate people to take action on your mail pieces. Launch limited period offers like a “30% discount till this weekend”.

Use Eye-Catching and Interesting Graphics

The design elements will also play a significant role in attracting people and making your mailpiece stand out. We recommend you use the ideal fonts and colors that align well with your brand. It should also appeal to your target audience.

Keeping it Simple 

People should be able to understand and redeem your direct mail offers readily. Causing confusing language or complex instructions would only discourage people from acting on your mail pieces. Thus, it would help if you focused on minimalism and simplicity.

Continuous Testing and Refinement 

A/B testing is a great way to refine direct mail offers and enhance response rates. Start testing different offers, graphics, and messages to determine the most suitable for your target audience.

With these tips, you can draft direct mail offers that gather attention and drive better sales. We also recommend you measure the results of your campaigns and make adjustments accordingly.

Now that you know about the effectiveness of direct mail offers, you must be curious to learn about the best campaigns you can try. All these campaigns will drive more leads into your business and raise brand awareness.

Creative Postcards 

Sending postcards is the best way to start your physical mail campaign with direct mail offers. You can provide your contact information and a powerful CTA (call-to-action) to get a higher response.

Making postcards in different sizes, types of paper, and a wide range of colours is possible. PostGrid can help you with fully customized postcards to leave a memorable experience for your recipients.

Adding Coupon Codes    

Most millennials believe they would try a brand that provides coupons or discounts on their products or services. Thus, it could be one of the best direct mail marketing campaigns to track the return on investment. You can put the codes on postcards, letters, or other printing materials.

Discounts on Birthdays and Anniversaries

Providing exclusive discounts on birthdays or anniversaries could be great to foster brand loyalty and remain top of mind. You can send postcards or letters to make your prospects or customers feel special. Timing plays a considerable role in this kind of offer. Thus, your postcard must reach on the day of the event or as near to it as possible.

Detailed Brochures 

If you want in-depth information, send brochures instead of postcards or letters. This format makes adding photos, icons, product guides, menu listings, and more easier. Integrating unique direct mail offers to make your brochures more enticing is possible.

Interactive Mail  

As the name suggests, interactive mail is ideal for recipients looking for interactivity and engagement. It consists of physically grabbing your recipient’s attention to your mail.

Some examples of interactive mail include;

• Huge stickers
• Free product samples or testers
• Lumpy mail
• Scratch cards (an amazing option for coupons)
• AR Prints

Give Customers Something to Keep 

Do you want to make your direct mail piece more memorable? Include on-brand items in your direct mail piece to make the experience more fun and practical. It could be anything like fridge magnets, fidget spinners, sticky notes, etc. These items help you lead one of the best direct mail marketing campaigns.

Promote Solutions, Not Products 

Okay, this might seem a bit complex to understand. Yet, letting customers know how they’ll benefit from using your business is fundamental. When writing the marketing copy, focus on something other than promoting your business’s products or services. Instead, focus on what customers can gain from doing a specific action with your product or service. It is always a significant reason behind the success of advertising direct mail campaigns.

For example, simply promoting heater fixing service won’t drive significant interest in your business. Instead, focus on something unique like “get your heating solutions fixed, even at 3 a.m.”

Adding Multiple Coupons  

Do you want to find out which discount is more popular with your audience? Then start providing multiple direct mail offers on a single piece of snail mail. For example, you can give a 12% discount to new customers and a 25% discount on their second purchase. New customers will use one discount now and the other later. It ensures higher customer loyalty.

Build Curiosity by Sending Everything Inside Envelopes 

Tactility is one of the major advantages of using direct mail API over email. The physical nature of a flat envelope piques your customer’s interest in your piece. Your direct mail offers will get more attention and engagement, creating excitement and anticipation.

Send Limited-Time Promotions 

You have to create a sense of urgency to encourage actions and conversations better. Many businesses do this by launching limited-time promotions on their products or services. You can also implement a great advertising direct mail strategy in your campaigns.

Whether it’s a limited-time shipping discount or a 50% weekly sale, these direct mail offers can encourage customers to take action immediately. Businesses often use these promotions during the holiday season to incentivize people to become new customers.

Direct Mail Offers with QR Codes or Links 

Physical mail can work as a starting point to drive your customers to take a specific action. For example, visiting your website or redeeming a code. You can achieve this by adding QR codes or trackable URLs in your direct mail pieces. It would help you lead your customers toward your store, website, or landing page.

Personalize Your Direct Mail Offers 

Not all offers are attractive to everyone. Personalization is a vital aspect of direct mail campaigns. Customization could significantly affect your customers, even just with the first name.

You can consider your customers’ buying interests to personalize direct mail offers. For example, someone with a luxury car could be a great target for auto insurance. Effective personalization can give you a higher return on investment (ROI) by up to 200%.

Create a Quiz to Increasing Involvement 

Do you want to intrigue the audience with your mail piece? Try creating a quiz to generate interest and provide exclusive direct mail offers to the winners. You can include quizzes in your newsletters and expect better campaign control. Using a quiz maker can streamline the process and enhance engagement.

Loyalty Rewards 

A loyalty program can help you keep your customers engaged with new direct mail offers. You can create different levels of loyalty program memberships to provide incremental rewards. It will motivate them enough to stick to your brand and contribute to your growth.

Like any other marketing campaign, a direct mail campaign begins with a concrete goal. Determine what you want to accomplish with your direct mail campaign. It could be anything from increasing foot or web traffic to increasing sales or brand awareness.

After this, you will need a mailing list and a printing partner to start mailing your pieces. Here are some other critical elements of best direct mail marketing campaigns;

• Determine a goal for your campaign (For example, generating leads, increasing sales, driving referrals, or raising brand awareness).
• Establish a targeted mailing list.
• Choose the format type of direct mail to send.
• Create the design of your mail piece, browse through our template gallery, or use our HTML template editor.
• Find a direct mail service that fits your requirements, such as PostGrid.
• Implement physical coupons, QR codes, landing pages, or promo codes to track the success of your campaign.
• Analyze the campaign results and use the insights for your future marketing campaigns.

Now that you know the importance of direct mail offers, it’s time to find the right platform to handle your mailing needs.

An advertising direct mail marketing campaign needs a flexible, personalizable, and automated direct mail platform.

You can get all this by using PostGrid Print & Mail API to launch the best direct mail marketing campaigns. Create, print, mail, and automate all your direct mail campaigns with our API.

Any business will be glad to use our platform because;

PostGrid Gives You Scalable Solutions 

Our REST API can scale according to workloads, demands, and communication channels.

Smooth Integrations to Marketing Tools 

If you are looking for a tool that integrates well with your marketing software, then PostGrid provides smooth integration without the need to write a single line of code.

Track and Analyze Your Marketing Campaigns 

With PostGrid, you can complete analytics and tracking on all orders for advertising direct mail campaigns.

Address Verification for Accurate Delivery 

Ensuring deliverability is also vital to get the maximum responses on your advertising direct mail pieces. We can help you achieve this by providing a USPS-certified address verification API.

Personalize Your Advertising Direct Mail 

We provide variable printing technology and an HTML template editor to help you personalize your direct mail pieces. Make a memorable impression with personalized direct mail.

Signup now to implement the best direct mail offers.