What is Direct Mail Channel?
Businesses belonging to all industry verticals are now turning to an omnichannel approach in order to optimize their operative and administrative capabilities. The omnichannel approach gained popularity in the marketing field back in 2019, and its demand only seems to grow bigger each passing day. It is now the preferred marketing strategy for tech giants like Google and small startups alike. The biggest selling point of omnichannel marketing is unparalleled convenience.
The omnichannel capability has now become somewhat of a necessity for every marketing that even direct mail campaigns are now optimized with the omnichannel capability. As a result, direct mail is no longer what it traditionally used to be where it was a purely offline marketing method. Today, it is possible for marketers to automate the entire direct mail process, including personalization, printing, and delivery.
Apart from this, direct mail campaigns are now used in tandem with online and offline mediums in order to ensure the best result.
The direct mail channel we have today is not just limited to a piece of paper but a tool that can effectively direct the target audience to their website or landing page
This is a much more effective way to boost the conversion rates of businesses. Furthermore, it gives you managerial control over the operations as you get access to advanced features like segmentation.
This article discusses how direct mail channels can be effectively used to get the best result for your marketing operations. We discuss how direct mail marketing has changed over the years to incorporate online mediums in its operations and why it is important to combine online and offline marketing strategies. Furthermore, we also take a look at the various advantages of using advanced direct mail channels, including automation and omnichannel orchestration.
Why is Direct Mail Marketing Still Relevant?
As far as marketing campaigns go, direct mail campaigns offer one of the best ROIs you can get. Apart from the high ROI potential of the direct mail campaigns, direct mail is also capable of generating a high response from the target audience. Furthermore, a survey by Marketing Charts found that the direct mail ROI has a higher ROI than paid search and online display ads. After social media, direct mail comes in at number two in terms of ROI.
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5 Reasons Why Direct Mail Channels is An Ideal Marketing Tool
There are several other reasons why direct mail channels are considered an ideal marketing tool, and we discuss some of them below.
1. Direct Mail is More Interactive
Direct mails are feasible, and the ability to touch and feel them in our hands makes it much more interactive than a plain old text message or email. The recipient is guaranteed to glance through their direct mail, unlike digital messages, which many just leave in their inbox without ever bothering even to open them. You can even include promotional offers and coupons, which they can redeem immediately through online or offline channels.
2. Direct Mail is More Memorable
Getting postal mails, opening them, and reading them tends to evoke a feeling of nostalgia inside the recipient, like when receiving a Christmas card from their friends and families back in the day. You can further try to make an emotional response from the recipients by personalizing the direct mail better using advanced direct mail automation tools like PostGrid. Although personalization is possible without automation, it will cost you a huge chunk of time and effort, not to mention the high chance of error of doing it manually.
3. Direct Mail Has Higher Reach
Direct mail is capable of reaching a much wider audience as it can reach a wider demographic than online marketing efforts, especially if your target audience is less likely to use online channels like social media, email, and so on. Furthermore, you can put a printed QR code or pURL in the direct mails, which the user can use to take themselves to your business’s website or landing page.
4. Direct Mail Allows You to Get Creative
Direct mail campaigns enable marketers to get more creative with their marketing efforts. For example, an investment company could send out coke and mentos with a subtle text implying that the recipient can also explode their profits like coke and mentos.
Similarly, finding ideas that are different and able to catch the audience’s undivided attention can be used via a direct mail channel. Furthermore, using such unconventional means to convey a message is bound to be remembered by the target audience for a long time.
5. Direct Mail Has Relatively Low Competition
Unlike the digital space, which is often crowded with all the marketers trying to run behind the same audience to grab their attention. Whereas direct mail campaigns are not as common as digital campaigns are in today’s world. This means that you have a better chance of getting noticed by the target audience as long as you make use of direct mail before it becomes too mainstream. Furthermore, being the early bird has its own advantages and can help you hone your direct mail channel and operations to achieve the best result.
Also Read: Customer Onboarding Strategies
Why is it Important to Incorporate Online Capabilities into Your Direct Mail Channel
We have already mentioned that the new-age direct mail channel does not rely solely on offline marketing capabilities but effectively uses technology to boost its results. However, it is vital that you understand how using digital capabilities in combination with an offline marketing channel like direct mail can boost your results. Below we discuss some of the major online capabilities you get that can be extremely helpful for your direct mail marketing campaign.
Personalization
One of the subtle yet important parts of making a direct mail campaign work in your favour is personalization. Although personalization is capable of manually, it would take you a great deal of time and effort to do it. Even still, manual processing could have many errors, which could potentially waste all your hard work. Therefore, it is evident that automation is necessary if you want to be able to personalize your direct mail, especially if you are sending bulk mails.
Using an advanced direct mail automation tool like PostGrid, all you have to do is integrate the direct mail API and connect the direct mail system with your CRM. The CRM can provide the details needed for personalizing the direct mail like the customer’s name, address, etc. Furthermore, you can also add custom images that are hyper-targeted towards each audience or use different text formats that can better resonate with each of them.
Segmentation
As far as direct mail campaigns are concerned, there were little to no segmentation capabilities using the legacy solutions. But now, you have superior segmentation capabilities for your direct mail campaigns using advanced tools that enable you to target the right audience at the right time. This segmentation capability of the new direct mail channel allows you to cut down on unnecessary costs by ensuring the direct mail is sent to an audience that is most likely to find its content to be helpful or relevant.
You can target direct mail towards an audience that falls inside a certain category. For example, you can set the target audience to be people who have previously responded to one of your direct mail campaigns in the past. Similarly, you can also target others, such as those who have previously made a purchase from your business within a time gap. You can even target people who have interacted with your business across different platforms.
Another advantage of direct mail is that you don’t need the recipient’s permission to send out direct mails to them. This enables you to reach out to customers and potential customers who chose not to receive any promotional emails, text messages, or push campaigns. This way, direct mail channels can be an effective way to convince your past customers to re-engage with your brand and also to make them active on your brand’s other marketing channels, including social media.
Automation
The biggest advantage of using a direct mail channel in terms of convenience is automation. It is now possible for you to automate your direct mail campaigns just as you do with email and SMS campaigns. This means using an advanced direct mail automation tool like PostGrid. You can make sure that your direct mail reaches the right audience, at the right time, in the right place. This is one of the reasons why direct mail campaigns are more capable of sparking engagements than other marketing strategies.
There are many instances where automation is no longer an option but a necessity, like when a credit card company wants to send a credit card bill to its customers. With an automated system, the company need not do anything as long as its systems are interconnected. For example, personalization of direct mail is significantly easier if the direct mail system is connected with your website’s CRM, and this can be easily implemented using PostGrid’s advanced API.
Omnichannel Capability
Direct Mail Channel is the last place one would expect to see omnichannel capabilities if it wasn’t for advanced solutions like PostGrid that seamlessly connect the online and offline worlds together. The ability to coordinate your direct mail campaigns with your digital marketing campaigns enables you to provide your target audience with a holistic experience. You can use QR codes or URLs, or PURLs to navigate your target audience from the mailpiece to your website or landing page.
Furthermore, you can also make use of an orchestration engine that will make the omnichannel orchestration of your campaigns easier to manage. You can even try innovative ideas where there are games involved that take the audience through the various online and offline mediums and encourage participation by offering a reward that the target audience can’t resist. The omnichannel capabilities not only make your campaigns more effective but managing them also becomes significantly easier.
Conclusion
The direct mail channel is no longer what it once used to be. It has evolved over the years and adapted to the changes in business operations. However, this new type of direct mail channel which incorporates online and offline capabilities is yet to be properly utilized by businesses. Most businesses now depend solely on digital marketing channels and have entirely abandoned direct mail channels as a marketing tool. Many are not even aware that direct mail has a higher ROI than almost all digital channels.
Direct mail channels can now be optimized using an advanced direct mail automation tool like PostGrid, which comes with capabilities such as address verification and superior integration capacity.
Using a tool like PostGrid not only helps you automate the direct mail process but enables you to make sure that the addresses you have are real and deliverable. This considerably reduces the return rate of direct mail, and as a result, it becomes increasingly easier to manage your direct mail and also boost its ROI.
