Automated Postcards Mailing in Canada
Businesses of all kinds used to send out postcards to their customers sometimes as a symbol of goodwill, sometimes as part of their marketing effort, and sometimes to wish them for the holidays. Times have changed, and postcards are now one of the most effective marketing tools employed by small, medium, and large businesses. Even though the digital marketing sector has taken over the marketing efforts of practically every industry, automated direct mail is employed in tandem with it for the best result.
When it comes to direct mail, postcards are especially effective in bringing the desired results because of their ability to have attractive images/infographics as well as concise messages. In this article, we discuss automated postcards for marketing purposes. We explain how automated postcards can add value to your marketing efforts. We also take a look at how you can optimize your postcard marketing. Additionally, we discuss how A/B testing and engagement tracking can help you streamline your postcard marketing efforts.
Why Use Automated Postcard Mailing
Postcard marketing is not something new to marketers. Even though postcard marketing was defined much later, the basic principle behind them never changed. When it is executed properly, postcard marketing has the potential to be even more effective than your online marketing efforts. Furthermore, postcard or direct mail marketing has a significantly higher ROI or Return on Investment than most of the popular digital marketing methods. However, to accomplish this, you need to incorporate advanced technology in your postcard marketing.
Today, even corporate giants like Amazon and Starbucks employ direct mail campaigns as part of their marketing strategies. The truth is that even small-time eCommerce retailers now use direct mail for finding and re-engaging with customers offline. Perhaps the most compelling reason behind the success of direct mail, especially postcards, is their tangible nature and ability to convey a memorable experience to the recipients. The only downside is that it takes a lot of time and effort to execute postcard marketing properly.
Thanks to advanced automated solutions available for direct mail today, you can optimize your direct mail process and send out postcards without wasting your valuable time. Another challenge that often troubled marketers while using direct mail as their communication channel is the return rate of mail. A high return rate would mean capital and resource loss to the business. Thankfully, we now have SERP-certified direct mail software that can verify any address in Canada using the official address database of Canada Post.
Also Read: Bulk Or Mass Mail Services
Personalizing Your Automated Postcard Mailing
Personalization is the key to creating a successful postcard marketing campaign regardless of your business vertical. But, unfortunately, many marketers still knowingly or unknowingly end up ignoring personalization when they try to cut corners. Personalization is crucial when it comes to postcards, and it must not be underestimated under any circumstance. It could be the differentiating factor that decides whether your postcard goes straight to the dumpster or a valuable conversion.
Personalization used to be a major challenge for businesses in the past, but the times have changed. With an advanced direct mail solution such as PostGrid, you can fully automate and personalize your postcards. Systems such as PostGrid are certified by SERP or Software Evaluation and Recognition Program from Canada Post. This means that you can verify your address database with Canada Post’s official address database to get valuable and clean data that can further help you with personalization.
Furthermore, you can integrate an advanced direct mail solution into your website’s CRM. Once integrated, you can easily personalize your postcards by plugging in the variable data obtained from the CRM database. When personalizing the postcards, you should not stop at just using the customer’s first name. You should go through their purchase history, recent purchases, and even abandoned cart data and develop a message that’s truly relevant to the recipient.
Also Read: Best Direct Mail Marketing Companies
A/B Testing Different Postcard Concepts
A/B Testing is a blessing for marketers and even more so for marketers that use postcards as a part of their marketing efforts. A/B testing allows you to find out how well the postcard you use resonates with your target audience. By doing so, A/B testing enables you to make the right decisions for your campaign. By definition, A/B testing is a user experience research methodology in which two variants (postcards in this case) are taken and scrutinized against each other.
Typically, the two postcard variants, A and B, are compared against each other in terms of how attractive or effective they are to the target audience. Although there are several practices that allow you to test the effectiveness of your postcard design and copy, nothing comes close to A/B testing because it literally puts your ideas to the test—for the most accurate results, using an audience that aligns well with your buyer persona. There are numerous variations you can try during A/B testing.
You can try using different postcard sizes in your marketing campaign but keep in mind that postage charges can also vary depending on their size. You can also try on different colour schemes, graphics, and other visual elements and see which one gets the best response from your test subjects. Try including attractive infographics or images in your postcard as they have a better impact on the reader than plain-old text content. Images and infographics can convey maximum information with minimal effort.
Tracking Engagement
Sending direct mail, including postcards, for marketing your business is no longer just elaborate guesswork. Enhanced direct mail solutions like PostGrid enable you to have superior tracking capability over your direct mail campaigns. Today, instead of just measuring the response rate of the postcard you send out, you can fully automate your direct mail, making them highly interactive and accurately trackable. As a result, you can optimize your direct mail to the extent that you’ve never thought possible.
Tracking your direct mail or postcards is relatively easy, and you have a number of ways you can do it. The most popular among these is using QR codes or PURLs (Personalised URLs). Using methods like QR codes for tracking is ideal for all businesses because they are especially effective in generating a response from the target audience. This is because QR codes are extremely convenient to the user. All they have to do is scan the code to access whatever offer you have mentioned in your mailpiece. Plus, it takes very little space.
The PURLs or Personalized URLs are also very popular mostly because of the personal touch it has. Seeing the personalized URL with their name in it piques the user’s curiosity and ultimately results in them visiting your website/landing page. Directing the user to your website or landing page enables you to use advanced tools preexisting in your website to get valuable insights on website visits and conversions. You can even get specifics such as the number of people who visited your page, conversion rate, click-through rates, and you may even track direct mail’s behaviour on your website/landing page.
Conclusion
Automated postcards have changed the way direct mail campaigns work and revolutionized it like never before. With an automated system like PostGrid, you now have complete control over your direct mail campaigns. Being able to personalize and automate the direct mail process is the biggest change systems like PostGrid have made possible. However, that is not all you can gain from employing SERP-certified systems like PostGrid. You can also validate your addresses using Canada Post’s official address database, which ultimately ensures that your addresses are real and deliverable. This means automated postcards can get the best result for your direct mail campaign when it is employed using an advanced tool like PostGrid.
