In the digital marketing era, you often don’t hear much about the direct mail industry. And for good reason. Until recently, there was not a lot exciting new technologies and great ideas exciting enough to talk about.
In the digital marketing era, you often don’t hear much about the direct mail industry. And for good reason. Until recently, there was not a lot exciting new technologies and great ideas exciting enough to talk about.
Recently, however, the industries been back on track and finally integrated into the digital marketing ecosystems. While the traditional direct mail industry is still massive at well over $40 billion annually, the transition from press to digital platform has begun – and it’s moving quickly. Digital printers, SaaS integrations, and direct mail automation are all part of the new direct mail.
That’s good news for B2C marketers who are looking for new channels to generate growth, but require detailed campaign tracking, easy operation, and customer cost of acquisition transparency. Direct mail is now easier to manage, more flexible, and more effective. For marketers, that can mean better higher marketing ROI and lower lead conversion rates.
So how exactly has direct mail improved? Here are four ways that direct mail has improved and begun to catch up with other digital marketing channels:
We’ve all seen postcards and letters with a personalized first name, but that’s just the start. Similar to web and email, Direct mail can now use deep targeting and personalization that includes personalized text, images, promotional offers, and urls.
For marketers, that means that you can deliver the right design and message to the right prospect and customer. Whether your segmenting between current customers and prospects, geo-targeting for a new store opening, or sending different promotion to different buyers, your direct mail be as targeted as your data allows.
In the world of iPhone, Amazon, and digital promotions, customers purchase decision are made more quickly. Old direct mail typically is takes weeks to arrive – which is absolutely fine if you’re not in a rush to get your printed offer into your prospects living room to be read. But more and more, marketers want to reach customers quickly based on specific online or offline actions that customer has taken.
With triggered direct mail and easy to manage campaigns, your company can get your peronslaize postcard in the mail within 24 after processing. That means your printed mail arrives to your buyers mail box in 3-4 days, no matter where in the US they reside. Not bad – taking into account printing and USPS delivery times for first class mail.
If there’s one thing we know about marketing and results – and this applies equally to landing pages, new product launches, or emails designs – is that there is no substitute for testing. With the advent of variable data digital printing, direct marketers were able to send more targeted postcards in smaller batches, enabling more effective testing capability.
Now, direct mail platforms provide the ability to fully A/B test copy, creative, and offers so that marketers can know exactly what is working – and what isn’t.
One new innovation from the USPS is tracking of expected delivery date of your letter or postcard. If your customer is going to respond to your offer, chances are that they’ll call you, email, you, or visit your website fairly soon after.
But more importantly, we can now track phone calls, landing page visits, and whether a new customer received a postcard in the first place. That means that you can run a 3-month direct mail campaign and have a pretty good idea whether you’re on track to meet your advertising or customer acquisition objectives.
