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How to leverage social media and direct mail for successful multichannel campaigns

Credit: Ocko Geserick

It may be tempting to view direct mail and social media in two very distinct silos: old and new, conventional and progressive. But marketers who can bring the two together and leverage them as part of a multi-channel campaign stand to benefit from a more dynamic marketing effort that can yield some pretty impressive results. 

For example, a recent USPS white paper on the future of direct mail found 60% of marketing respondents experienced increased ROI when combining direct mail with a digital component like social media, and 68% reported an increase in website visits. 

Those numbers are hard to ignore, so with that in mind, let’s look at a couple of interesting ways marketers can use direct mail and social media together to create an effective bridge between the print and digital realms. 

Let geolocating show you the way

Marketers looking to target certain geographic locations can build hyperlocal social media advertising campaigns to deliver ads to very specific regions — and the same principle also applies to platforms like Google when building display ad campaigns. 

Platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn allow marketers to target consumers by city, state, and even ZIP code, and this can prove a useful sandbox to test where your ideal consumer resides, or if your ideal consumer will be receptive to your direct mail content based on where they live.  

The insights gained through this kind of targeted social media marketing can then help you optimize direct mail services such as the Postal Service’s Every Door Direct Mail, which allows you to identify and execute direct mail campaigns by targeting specific ZIP codes, neighborhoods, or household size. 

Social media also has a relatively low bar in terms of the time and resources required to conduct A/B testing with content or images to really dial in the messaging your customer responds to. The results of this testing can then inform and help fuel the design and execution of a direct mail campaign with the goal of achieving a robust response rate.    

Take your event marketing to the next level

The speed at which social media content moves is part of what can make it so valuable for companies in creating event marketing campaigns — it makes spreading the word about the conferences and trade shows you’re attending or sponsoring relatively quick and easy. 

And while direct mail doesn’t move at quite the same clip as social media, it does appeal to an already receptive audience; a USPS study found that 42% of 25-34 year-olds read their mail immediately upon receiving it, and the same study indicated consumers were more likely to make a purchase because they received a mail piece. 

When promoting an event, pairing the speed and amplification of social media with the ability of direct mail to prompt a desired action makes for a potentially potent combination. 

For example, you can use social media to help drum up excitement and drive attendance to an event. Then, with a little bit of preparation in terms of collecting mailing addresses in your booth, you can send a personalized direct mail thank you with a special offer only available to those who attended. 

Plus, including event-specific hashtags with the mailer can stimulate social conversation about both the event and special offer — and because no one wants to experience the fear of missing out, this kind of coordinated effort can help increase your number of social media followers in anticipation of a similar event and offer in the future.  

Use social media to build a direct mail list

Social media is a good vehicle for promoting things like digital content offers where a potential customer can quickly complete a form and then receive a white paper, survey, or report that aims to help solve their challenge or problem. The same principle can apply when it comes to direct mail campaigns and the promise of helping a customer overcome a hurdle. 

Instead of a landing page with a gated piece of content, why not design a social media campaign that directs to a landing page and form with the promise of an exclusive offer or promo code in exchange for opting into direct mail?

Not only can this help you build a contact list over a period of time — a social media campaign needs consistent runtime before evaluating whether or not it was successful — but it can also help you identify key accounts or contacts that may be good targets for an exclusive offer that’s a little more valuable. This recent lumpy is a good example of a mailer we sent to such key accounts.     

Thinking of social media in this way may not only help you expand your contact database, but the mailing addresses provided can also give you more insight into the geographic locations of your customers, which can in turn fuel more targeted digital marketing efforts via social media and/or PPC advertising. 

Direct mail today is an inherently different proposition than it was even 10 years ago — and this is even more true about social media. Thinking about the relationship between direct mail and social media in ways like we’ve discussed could very well help you equip yourself for what the next 10 in  multi-channel marketing will look like.  


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