Summer GouldA multichannel marketing approach creates more opportunities to personalize your communications, reach your prospects and customers where they are, as well as build lasting engagement. You can enhance your direct mail by adding digital or vice versa. So how can you do this?
First, you need to identify your targeting points for prospects and customers.
- Awareness – There can be two types of awareness. One targets prospects to show them how you can help them and the other is for customers to get them to buy new things from you.
- Desire – At this point your prospect or customer is showing an interest in your product or service but have not purchased yet.
- Evaluation – During this period you can entice people to buy from you, by sending them special offers based on what they have shown interest in.
- Transaction – Yeah, they have bought from you! Don’t forget to offer them something that goes along with what they purchased or a special coupon to share with a friend. You want to keep them engaged with you.
- Loyalty – Now that they are customers you want to provide special offers, discounts and friend deals to show your appreciation. Happy customers keep coming back.
Let’s look at some USPS advanced direct mail statistics:
- 60% of marketers said combining digital with direct mail increased their ROI.
- 84% of Informed Delivery users said they click on digital promotions at least once a month.
- 20% increase in conversion rates by using retargeted direct mail.
So how can you create advanced direct mail to get these kinds of results?
- Informed Delivery – You can send a digital ad to your mail list’s email inbox with the post office so that your prospects and customers can start purchasing before they even go to their mail box.
- Mail tracking – You can track your mail so you know when your piece arrives in mail boxes. This allows you to trigger other channels to add touchpoints.
- Retargeted direct mail – Most of the time this is a postcard (they are the most cost effective) with a special offer based on what the person was interested in.
- Digitally enhanced direct mail – Bring your direct mail to life with digital experiences such as NFC, Augmented Reality and more!
Your data is the key to your marketing success, bad data equals bad marketing. In order to do retargeting you need to not only know what your prospect/customer was interested in, but you need to send that postcard within 48 hours to make the most impact. This will require technology on your part to capture the correct information and provide that to your mail service provider to act upon. All your marketing efforts need to feed into your data to keep it up to date as well as accurate.
Social media and other digital channels are great for building awareness, but they are less effective at generating transactions. Direct mail can do both, making it the ideal component to add to your marketing mix. By creating advanced direct mail with Informed Delivery, Informed Visibility, retargeted direct mail and digitally enhanced mail you can bring your marketing campaigns to life.
Advanced direct mail helps to prompt prospect/customer action and sets your company apart from the crowd. You are seen as more modern and cutting-edge. You have also proven that you know how to provide excellent customer service by providing them with offers they can use. Are you ready to get started?
