How Can a Strong Direct Mail Marketing Strategy Generate Leads?
Cutting through the marketing noise is incredibly hard, considering the stiff competition. Savvy companies are using multiple marketing channels to target their audience. Facebook, Google Ads, YouTube videos, and email campaigns are powerful enough to impact your potential customers.
However, can you penetrate the market with these common advertising channels? Every brand uses these mediums to acquire customers and retain existing ones. How will you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
Many brands are ditching age-old marketing strategies like direct mail for digital marketing and social media. It doesn’t mean that these methods were ineffective. You can still get the best value from direct mail marketing with the correct implementation.
Automation for direct mail could be another contributor to your advertising success. People dislike the influx of digital information. This blog will help you learn everything about direct mail marketing strategy.
What is a Direct Mail Marketing Strategy?
Direct mail is one of the earliest marketing efforts. Marketers use mailers like postcards, letters, brochures, and booklets to promote their brand to a targeted audience. The printed materials feel more trustworthy and memorable than digital ads.
A direct mail marketing strategies can result in faster sales and better brand awareness. It is still one of the most effective targeted advertising methods for business owners. However, marketers must follow the best practices to get the best results.
For example, creativity makes up 20% of your campaign’s effectiveness. You must pay close attention to creating a unique and exciting design for your mailers. It can directly impact your response rate and return on investment (ROI).
Effectiveness of Direct Mail Marketing for Professionals and Brands
Many argue and challenge the effectiveness of direct mail campaigns. They often undermine its power in the modern landscape of marketing. However, the reality is entirely different, with direct mail proving a highly effective strategy for many brands worldwide.
People Love Receiving Direct Mail
Digital content is dominating the world in the information age. People consume digital content on different devices, such as mobile phones, tablets, computers, smart watches, etc. However, this influx of information is overwhelming people.
They don’t remember any information from these digital ads.
How many marketing emails have you read recently?
The answer would be almost zero. We tend to ignore, archive, or delete these marketing emails.
Direct mail is emerging as a successful alternative to digital ads. People enjoy receiving direct mailers in their mailboxes. Seniors feel more familiar with physical mail than digital communication. They love the tactile and personalized nature of these collaterals.
Millennials also prefer the security and privacy of direct mail over digital counterparts. They are more likely to take action on a call-to-action after receiving a mail.
Achieve Better Response Rates than Email Campaigns
Direct mail always feels more natural and personal. People won’t discard your marketing mail without taking a look. In comparison, your prospects might ignore your emails. You can expect a minimum response rate of 0.5 to 2 percent with direct mail marketing campaigns.
These numbers can increase when you infuse creativity and include relevant offers in your mailers. A compelling call-to-action, discounts, and coupons are necessary to increase the response rate.
Account-Based Marketing Does Wonders to Your Brand
A strong ABM campaign needs smooth collaboration between the marketing and sales teams. They must create a personalized experience for users under their brand.
Direct mail lets you reach your customers and create multiple touchpoints. You can still connect with a personal experience if you cannot contact them by email (simply because of low expertise or due to some other reasons).
Direct Mail is Less Competitive than Emails
Every brand and marketing professional uses email blasts to generate leads. You can imagine the incredible competition in every industry with this communication medium.
People are ditching traditional approaches in favour of digital marketing techniques. An estimate suggests people will be sending 325 billion emails per day by 2025.
There is far less competition in direct mail than in email marketing campaigns. People will find your mailers less intrusive and spammy than marketing emails.
Higher Reach than Other Marketing Channels
Seniors contribute a considerable portion of the Canadian population. This audience may not prefer digital communication for receiving information. Direct mail marketing can have a more significant impact on this audience who have low experience in digital channels.
Brands can spread the message to everyone in a household by sending a single mail piece. This way, you can significantly reduce your marketing expenditure.
A Super Creative and Memorable Way of Reaching Customers
Digital marketing collaterals don’t provide a uniform experience for every consumer. For example, some might view an ad on an iPhone’s retina display, and some may experience it on a potato computer.
Direct mail marketing gives you the chance to get highly creative and innovative. Postcards and handwritten notes can help you build a unique experience.
Stunning design and personalized messages are necessary to make your campaigns memorable and effective.
How Do You Create a Consistent Direct Mail Marketing Strategy?
Direct mail campaigns let you connect with specific audiences that are difficult to reach with online channels.
Physical collaterals are ideal for building strong relationships with prospects and existing customers. However, you must know about the step-by-step approach to develop a foolproof strategy for your brand.
Here’s a quick plan you can implement for creating a direct mail campaign:
Create Market Segmentation to Understand Your Customers
Direct mail marketing works similarly to email campaigns when talking about customer segmenting. You must segment your audience into demographics like sex, age, marital status, income group, etc.
It would help you better understand the needs and preferences of a specific customer group. Increase sales and brand loyalty by personalizing your mail pieces. How can you do this without sacrificing your brand’s messaging or culture?
Update Your Mailing List with Accurate Information
We begin our campaigns by updating our mailing list to ensure direct mail marketing success. Duplication or obsolete data will increase your marketing expenditure without any reason.
You must keep up with the NCOA Mover Data Service to optimize the ROI of each marketing campaign. It is pointless to deliver marketing mail to the wrong or incorrect addresses.
We recommend you prefer an address validation software to verify each address in your mailing list. It will also help you autocomplete, validate, and standardize the address data.
Integrate Your CRM Data to Customize Your Direct Mail Collaterals
Your CRM system could be a goldmine of customer data. A direct mail marketing solution must consider CRM integration to personalize the marketing collaterals better.
The data from your CRM can help you learn purchasing habits and preferences. This information helps create personalized messages and relevant offers for the mailers.
Many marketers create the most exciting deals based on CRM data to grab everyone’s attention.
Personalize the Design and Marketing Message
Digital marketing lets you customize your design and messages according to your target audience. However, everyone uses these tools to include their creativity in digital communication.
You can take this one step further with direct mail marketing. Also, you can do a lot with unique paper, oversized envelopes, colours, fonts, QR codes, PURLs, messaging, and more.
Intelligent marketers find limitless creativity opportunities with direct mail marketing. This creative freedom and personal touch are necessary during the peak season to grab attention.
Include an Engaging Call-to-Action
Your mail pieces must motivate your recipients to take action. It is the whole point of sending a direct mail piece. You want them to act on the call-to-action line. This line must motivate them to consider your brand and tell them what to do next.
You can make this easy by providing your contact information. Recipients will automatically navigate according to your instructions.
Run Campaign Tests to Evaluate Your Mailers
No campaign is truly successful without its performance evaluation. You must neglect to launch a massive campaign in the beginning. An A/B testing mechanism is necessary to measure the performance of your mailers.
It will significantly save your marketing budget and inform you about the right direction. Send 100 postcards instead of the entire bunch to see what happens.
Later, you can analyze the results to tweak your next campaign. This last step can save your brand from catastrophic disasters.
What Affects the Cost of Direct Mail Marketing Campaigns?
The cost of a consistent direct mail marketing campaign depends on multiple factors. You can’t define a clear-cut price for every strategy.
What can impact the overall cost?
- Design
- Printing
- Postage
- Personalization
- Collateral
You can start by defining a particular budget for your campaign. We understand that postage will be your primary concern. Use the Canada Post calculator to get a fair estimate for your campaign.
Some direct mail marketing campaigns can be expensive. However, marketers also have some cost-effective strategies to streamline the expenditure. For example, sending postcards is a common practice to save marketing budget and get creative at once.
Best Formats for a Consistent Direct Mail Marketing Strategy
There could be so many formats while implementing a direct mail marketing strategy. However, only a few will suit your brand and its campaign. You can run an A/B test to determine the best from the following;
Postcards
They are one of the most popular collaterals among marketers. They mainly prefer postcards for their size and customization options. You cannot fold or insert anything into these mailers. However, you can print on both sides to increase the chances of getting read.
Digital printing makes it possible to customize postcards with custom text, graphics, and images. They stand as the perfect branding option for your business.
Folded Self-Mailers
A folded self-mailer is a single sheet of paper that you fold into panels for sealing at the edges. You won’t require a separate envelope for mailing this collateral. The mailing information is already present on the paper.
The more room on the paper makes it ideal for detailed direct mail marketing campaigns. You can use the larger size to include eye-catching visuals and engaging content. Brands prefer self-mailers to share their newsletters and additional information.
Brochures
Personal storytelling is an effective method to create anticipation and excitement for your brand. Brochures and booklets you communicate with your target audience on a deeper level.
People read this literature from direct mail and make their purchase decisions. You can showcase your products, services, or company culture through these mail pieces.
One can create a more significant impact by including coupon codes in brochures or booklets. The recipients will keep them for redeeming their codes.
Why Should You Consider PostGrid Direct Mail For Your Brand?
Traditional direct mail is dying with the rise of innovative digital marketing solutions. However, automation and APIs can still save direct mail from becoming obsolete.
PostGrid’s print and mail API is the perfect example of an automated solution for marketers. Our solution provides unlimited sending possibilities with complete privacy and compliance.
What to do first with our API?
We recommend marketers integrate our direct mail API into their software systems to create automated workflows. This way, they can create the perfect synchronization and harmony between online and offline marketing campaigns.
The API comes with easy integration options that require no effort. You can integrate the solution within minutes and create custom workflows.
Sign up now to automate your direct mail marketing strategy.
