CMO’s, Heads of Marketing, and Marketing Managers with their finger on the pulse are increasingly realising that Direct Mail Marketing needs to be brought back and integrated into their overall digital marketing strategy.
In essence, they’ve realised the increase in junk email and multiple channels-to-market have made reaching their audience much harder on a finite budget. Therefore, they’re using Direct Mail Marketing to help them achieve the ‘cut-through’ they need, to reach their highest priority and most profitable customers and prospects.
But that’s not all…
The really smart cookies are not just treating Direct Mail Marketing as another stand-alone channel… they’re fully integrating Direct Mail into their Digital Marketing customer journeys, and this has a whole bundle of both tangible and intangible benefits.
1) Integrating the message across all channels-to-market – direct mail, email, social media, digital advertising, etc. – and timing them to land at the same time increases the ‘Halo’ effect, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This means marketers gain more impact for ‘all’ their messaging.
2) The increased direct mail ‘cut-through’ helps promote awareness of the online organisation, boosting traffic to both social media and the website, which, in turn, will help boost the website’s SEO ratings. This means marketers are directly helping improve the visibility of their online assets.
3) It allows the marketer to quickly move their most valuable responders online and to tie them into engagement with the brand. This has a major benefit, as it reduces the future ‘cost to touch’ of campaigns. In effect, the direct mail is a gate-opener to allow further low-cost conversation and engagement.
4) Using segmented audience data allows the marketer to create Personalised Direct Mail messaging that directly aligns to the online experience. This means that the not only does the message have more impact offline, the same message continues online and, subsequently, reduces the possibility of buying drop-out.
5) Hyper-Personalised Direct Mail goes a step further, creating a one-to-one, consistent, highly personalised journey across both offline and online media. This can be tracked and attributed back to the direct mail marketing.
A Few Do’s and Dont’s for Integrating Direct Mail with a Digital Strategy
- Do map out possible audience journeys and objectives prior to integrating Direct Mail into your processes. By doing this, you can focus on what you actually want the direct mail messaging to do, ensuring you can establish clear aims and kpi’s.
- Do use the cleanest possible data for your Direct Mail Marketing. Whether online or offline, nobody likes being addressed wrongly, and data is the biggest asset a Marketer has in eliciting a positive response. If your data is correct at the start of the journey, it builds confidence and conviction throughout that journey.
- Do make sure you can track the call-to-action from the direct mail marketing into the online analytics. There are many ways you can do this; campaign landing pages, QR codes, unique offer codes and unique social media hashtags
- Drive the target audience toward high-value content. After data, the offer is the second most important contributor to a positive response. By placing this content online, you will be able to track effectiveness and retain the option to ‘gate’ the content to collect new prospects.
- Don’t Hard-sell. Your objective should be to move the target audience from your Direct Mail Marketing into the online arena, as soon as possible. To do this, it’s better to minimise any potential doubts in their mind. Being hard sold to is a huge impediment to this happening, being given something for free is the antithesis of hard selling.
- Do be single minded. In general, people want choice, but they don’t want too much choice. Studies show that having more options results in more indecision. Try to limit your calls-to-action to less than six, but ideally no more than three and, if you can, a single option. Remember, the more options you offer to the customer, the more information you need to provide to set their expectations of what will happen next, and this can lead to confusion. Less is definitely more when trying to migrate a customer from Direct Mail Marketing into the Digital World.
- Don’t give away all the goodies at once. Tempt the target audience into moving online with promises that you will solve their pain point. Of course, once they are online, you can track them and refine their journey, over time gradually reducing process drop-out.
Conclusion
Direct Mail Marketing, and especially Personalised Direct Mail and Hyper-personalisation, is the smart way to add impact to your marketing strategy. It’s especially relevant if you have a clear view of who your audiences are, what their lifetime value is, and if you have extensive data appended to their records. This allows you to be highly targeted in who you contact, and how much you spend to gain a response.
Gone are the days of mass mailing. Today’s marketers are being extremely savvy. They’re using direct mail marketing to create that initial cut-through with their most valuable customers and prospects, and then quickly moving them online, where they can be tracked, engaged and re-engaged with tailored offers.
Want some more help with direct mail best practices?
We have direct mail / digital integration specialists and campaign managers at Washington Direct Mail, who can work with you to understand your project and advise you on the most appropriate options for the best results.
All you have to do is get in touch with us.
0191 487 5148
At WDM… We Do More to help you.
