Personalized Direct Mail Marketing
Isn’t it appealing to be addressed by your name? You can not deny that it has magnetic power. It immediately attracts attention and generates curiosity. And that’s what personalization does. We’re talking about how we, marketers, leave no opportunity to offer and serve our audience’s personalized needs.
One size fits all approach never works and is never going to deliver desirable results. Personalization is the methodology of understanding that different customers have different needs and implementing them in your marketing. A one-to-one marketing technique, personalization is the art to address the consumer’s pain points and directly communicate with them instead of offering generic products.
Did you know that 91% of the customers will shop from the brand that offers them the relevant products and recommendations? Or that 80% of the consumers only engage with the brands that offer them a personalized experience?
Yes, personalized marketing helps a business steer ahead by:
- Empowering you to target individual customers
- Boosting the probability of engagement
- Exponentially enhancing the possibility of conversion
- Increasing the opening and click-through rates
- Maximizing the sales
- Creating a strong and loyal base of satisfied customers
Talking about marketing, we all know how a traditional marketing technique is making a comeback with a bang. And with time, businesses are realizing that direct mail marketing isn’t dead and is far more effective in yielding better output than its digital contemporaries. Marketing gurus swear by its ability to increase conversion exponentially.
Direct mail marketing is effective enough even in 2020, despite having digital competitors that seem quicker in terms of enhancing the response rate and gathering brand advocates. But personalization can give it an edge in this competitive landscape and make it more effective in generating desirable results.
So, What Exactly Is A Personalized Direct Mail?
- A direct mail piece – be it a letter, postcard, brochure, flyer, or catalogue – which you designed to communicate on a one-on-one basis with your customers, addressing and resolving their issues would be a personalized direct mail. Unlike direct mail sent to the masses, with no specific audience in mind, personalized direct mail is highly detailed, precise, and is a more focused form of marketing.
- To create a personalized direct mail campaign, marketers study the buyer’s persona and every stage of their journey to understand better that the product would be more relevant to the customers at which step of the offering. It involves segmenting the audience based on different factors such as the consumer’s behaviour, age, gender, region, etc.
- Today’s highly tech-based marketing landscape further helps marketers personalize every piece of the content to maximum specification to get better responses and boost the conversion rate. Personalizing direct mail in today’s world helps direct mail become more significant, convincing businesses to invest in it to gain maximum benefit.
- We know direct mail has a tangible personality, which is a peaceful way of standing out from the clutter and noise and attracting the attention of the target audience in today’s digital world. With personalization, you can further humanize the communication with the target audience. These personalized direct mail can make your potential customers take action and convert them into happy customers.
Also Read: Bulk Or Mass Mail Services
Before moving ahead, it is essential for you as a marketer or business operator to know why personalization in direct mail matters?
Customers don’t have the time to waste on the generic advertisements of products and services. They’re on the lookout for something that can immediately hold their attention and directly talk about their problems.
With personalized direct mail, you achieve exactly this.
Personalization helps both the business and consumers. It helps your brand gain a competitive advantage. A brand providing a personalized service or experience can get recommended by 77% of the consumers.
RedPoint Global and Harris Poll reported that 63% of the customers expect personalization as a service standard. Yes, it’s a deciding factor in whether the customer wants to go ahead with your product and services or not. We understand that it’s a time-taking process, yet the ROI you get with it is worth your marketing efforts.
Also Read: How To Write an Attention Letter
What Are The Benefits Of Personalized Direct Mail Marketing
High Open and Read Rate
USPS’s The Mail Moment’s stated that 98% of Americans check their mailbox every day. Unlike the digital counterpart – email – that often lands in the spam folder, mail gets seen and read if found relevant. The likelihood of opening and reading the direct mail pieces further increases if they’re personalized, address the recipient by their names, and come with tailored solutions to their problem.
High Response Rate
As per the direct mail association, a well-designed direct mail services campaign has played a crucial role in convincing 66% of the people to make a purchase. A personalized direct mail takes this up a notch by combining traditional marketing with the latest printing technology. The variable data and offset printing make direct mail stand out of the crowd and help consumers make well-informed decisions.
Better Targeting
Since personalization involves collecting specific data and information to send recommendations, offers, or services relevant to the particular customer, you can target a more qualified audience. This move also can help you attract the right audience at the right stage of the purchasing journey.
Gain Immediate Attention
Since with personalization, you begin a one-to-one communication with the prospects or the customers, it immediately garners their attention towards what you have to offer. They feel valued, and this emotional response makes them want to connect with you. Address their particular issue and watch wonders happen with your personalized direct mail.
Strengthen Trust
A well-planned and launched personalized direct mail is based on extensive research on different aspects of customers’ buying journeys. When customers consistently find the mail in their mailbox that addresses their pain points and offers products or services to resolve them, they trust that brand. Gradually, this creates a base of loyal customers who become your brand advocates.
Build Up Revenue
In the end, everything comes down to the revenue your business generates from the campaigns. And personalized direct mailing can help you amplify the revenue generation with its highly specific ads. Personalized direct mail campaigns are built on the customer’s shopping history, preferences, and the data acquired from the database because of integration. With a highly targeted marketing campaign, your business can maximize its revenue.
Now that you know the benefits of personalized direct mail, are you looking for ways to create an effective personalized direct mail that can steer your business ahead? Read further to know some of the best tips that you can easily incorporate in your marketing campaign.
Also Read: Best Direct Mail Marketing Companies
How to Create a Personalized Direct Mail that Enhances the ROI?
Data is the basics of personalizing direct mails. Collect data and information about your customers from social media channels. If it’s a one-on-one campaign, then look up their profile to see what interests them. According to the data collected, create a personalized direct mail and send them the most relevant offers, products, or services.
With modern technology at your disposal, you can also fetch data from your system through seamless CRM integration. For creating a campaign for the masses, you need to segment your target audience based on their region, gender, annual income, interests, and other factors that come into play to purchase your product.
It’s important to note that you must gather the data by keeping a few factors in mind, such as HIPAA, PIPEDA, and other respective standards and protocols. They should be stored safely and securely to avoid any leak—the best way to ensure this is with automated data collection and personalization technology.
Periodically Review the Data
What was working yesterday might not work today or in the future. Consumers’ preferences change with their needs and what the market has to offer. That’s why it’s crucial to periodically review which data is relevant and which one may fail to serve the purpose of lead generation anymore. This step can help your business with better resource allocation and maximize your return on investments.
Address Them by Their Name
As mentioned before, nothing gains attention and strikes the connection faster and deeper than when you address a prospect or customer by their name. Since you already have the data in your hand, use it to maximize your marketing efforts’ effectiveness.
Ensure Great Packaging
Unless the packaging is appealing, why would your customer open it in the first place? Think of unique ideas to pack your direct mail- something that would make them wonder if this has the solution to my problem. A captivating caption and a relevant image can exponentially increase your personalized direct mailer pieces’ open and read rate.
Put pURLs in the Direct Mail
Mentioning your brand’s URL in direct mail has now become the norm. You can take it one step ahead by adding a personalized URL (pURL) that would directly send the interested customer to the landing page. They would find all the information on this page customized to their requirements and the fields requiring their attention, pre-filled. pURLs piques the target customers’ curiosity to check what is on their personalized URL, which increases the visits to the website.
Also Read: Future of The Direct Mail Marketing
Empathize With Them
A personalized direct mail can never be successful until it works based on a client-business relationship of understanding the pain points. This step helps you create a customized strategy that can evoke the right emotion from the targeted audience, which in turn can enhance your customer engagement and build brand loyalty.
Incorporate Variable Data Printing
Variable data printing is undoubtedly the best way to make sure that every individual recipient receives a unique mailpiece addressing their concerns.
Send personalized offers and discounts to your prospects or customers using variable data printing, which gives you the freedom to change the printing material during the printing service. This way, you can add customized images, personalized URLs, change the language, a map showing the distance between your customer’s residence and your business, etc. It can further maximize the appeal and response rate for what you have to offer.
Create Thoughtful Copies
Copies make for one of the best-personalized market applications. Create a short, crisp, and concise copy for specific customers that immediately graze their attention and make them want to visit your website.
Send Reminders
If you’re selling one of those products or services that come with an average life span or utilization time, then it is evident that your consumers would need it again. Send a personalized direct mail reminding them of the product, and add a limited-period offer coupon to it to add urgency. It’ll prompt your customer to take immediate action. It’s important to note that you should avoid sending too many direct mails, or it may have an adverse impact on your brand image.
When designed and launched effectively, personalized direct mail can exponentially outperform your digital marketing strategies. But as mentioned before, it can be a tedious task. That’s why we suggest incorporating a direct mail automation software like that provided by PostGrid.
Also Read: What is Direct Mail Channel?
Why Use PostGrid for Personalized Direct Mail?
With the diverse range of templates available to select and customize with our built-in editor, PostGrid gives you the freedom to personalize offline communications with your customers the way you want, in a cost-effective manner.
PostGrid’s direct mail API is a one-click print-mail service that guarantees maximum benefits out of your marketing campaign with minimum effort.
Wondering how we can help you create effective personalized direct mail?
