Finding the Right Time and Ways to Use Direct-Mail Marketing Campaigns
Marketing has evolved to such an interconnected process that multichannel marketing has become the new best approach to reaching potential customers on all levels. While you’ve likely prepared a digital strategy to target your customers, direct-mail marketing can be an impactful addition to your campaign.
Almost every company has some form of email strategy in place, but the massive influx of emails can lead to customers not even opening messages, let alone reading them all the way through. Some recipients feel companies send too many emails and unsubscribe from mailing lists. When this happens, you lose one of your primary paths to contacting your customers – so how are you catching their attention?
Direct mail can fill the gap for customers who don’t respond to digital marketing efforts, but you can’t send just any direct mail and expect it to be successful. Finding the right time and ways to use direct-mail marketing campaigns is what will allow you to tap into new prospects in your audience.
Understanding Who to Send Direct Mail To
Understanding your audience is key to its success. If you can’t meet recipients’ preferences and needs, your campaign will likely fall flat, and you’ll have wasted your investment. Understanding your audience can ensure you’re targeting the right customers.
Determining who is most likely to respond to direct mail may vary depending on your customer base. Millennials are surprisingly more responsive to direct mail than you may expect, and you also want to target customers who check their mailboxes often. Customers who are interested in your products but don’t respond to digital efforts may be successful targets of direct marketing campaigns.
Don’t Go Immediately for a Hard Sell
You’re not very far along on the sales funnel if someone simply subscribes to your email list. That customer still has a long way to go before they’ll consider making a purchase. Since this person is still in the top of the sales funnel, you won’t want to go for a hard sell that may not gain any results.
Including these sorts of considerations in your email campaigns can seem like common sense after a few research sessions into best practices. You need to do the same with your direct-mail campaigns. Thankfully, many technological innovations exist that let you connect your customer data into your direct mail, creating customized offers for better results.
Some Best Practices for Successful Direct Mail Marketing
If you’re ready to start integrating direct mail into your marketing campaign, work on using these best practices:
Make sure your campaigns are trackable. Your direct-mail campaigns should direct recipients back to your online store in such a way that you can track from where these visitors and conversions come, allowing you to track the success of a campaign.
Focus on visuals. Digital content often focuses on short, compact language to better suit the needs of mobile devices and online reading habits, but direct mail is still not the place to send your customers overly detailed explanations of your products and services. Including a quality and relevant image can help engage your recipient without overloading them with textual information.
Provide a clear next step. Effective CTAs are easy to recognize and compelling to read, no matter if you’re on- or offline. Including one CTA per piece of direct mail is not only better for creating conversions, but also makes tracking return on investment for the campaign much more manageable.
Target people who regularly check their mail. Your well-crafted message won’t do any good if it sits in someone’s mailbox for a month. Make sure you send direct mail to those likely to read it, and especially to the contacts you aren’t getting a response from online.
Connect to online efforts. When your direct mail connects back to your digital marketing, you have a way to both appeal to shoppers’ tendencies and better track your campaigns.
Direct mail has a place in your marketing campaign, even with the shift to digital and online shopping. When you approach it with the right timing and content, you can find success.
Source:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/direct-mail-inbound-strategy
