As a final post to this direct mail response rates series, it only makes sense to highlight 6 tips for higher response rates altogether. With so many marketing channels and campaign options available today, it is important to know how to reach consumers efficiently. Cutting through the multichannel marketing clutter can be difficult to do, but with the right tools, marketers can make their messages stand out and improve return rates. Knowing how to use the correct combination of marketing tools and strategies can drive significant results in terms of sales, brand building and ROI.
Adding new tactics, like direct mail and postcard marketing, to your digital strategy can drive sales and increase ROI. Multichannel campaigns are critical and advances in data management, behavior tracking, USPS tracking capabilities and production timelines favor adding direct mail to dramatically increase response rates and help marketers grow their businesses.
#1 - Understand Your Audience.EMOTION |
Whether you live in the city or the ‘burbs, commute or work remotely, spend your days indoors or outdoors, or prefer solitary activities to group ones, you’re likely aware that you are inundated with messaging before you’ve had time to reply to your first email. Learn everything you can about your audience’s needs, purchase behavior, buying triggers, and media preferences. The most creative and impactful strategies starts with understanding the emotions and motivations behind the decision-making process. |
#2 - Importance of an Integrated Marketing Mix.
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Integrate online and offline strategies to optimize your campaign results. With an integrated campaign, you can reach the radio-listening, newspaper-reading, billboard viewers along with the podcast-listening, and working from home digitally-minded consumers. Different brands will have a variety of consumer segments enter their sales funnel in many different ways. Utilize a multichannel campaign mix, integrating display advertising, email, print, outdoor, social channels, broadcast, and direct mail. |
#3 - Why & When to Use Direct Mail Marketing.MEMORABLE |
Direct mail marketing offers the unique advantage of tangibility. Recipients can hold the personalized offer in their hands, save it, and emotionally connect with it. Direct mail marketing works especially well for verticals that need to create demand for their offer, such as banking, credit cards, fundraising, insurance, home improvement, communications, retail (catalogs), and numerous others. The direct mail piece should should be memorable to the customer. The piece should stand out in the mail pile, perhaps through an oversized format, a textured paper stock, or a protective poly bag, to name a few. Headline copy should convey urgency to open it, whether it’s a feeling of exclusivity, a limited time offer, or some other appeal to emotions. |
#4 - Test Something New to Maximize Your Long-term ROI.EXPERIMENT |
Direct Marketing provides the perfect opportunity to continuously test and retest especially if you are tracking response and can take those A/B test learnings and optimize them. Personalization, digital response, and digital display are all marketing tactics that can be incorporated into your campaigns to help create greater user engagement and improve response. Test something new with every marketing campaign to maximize your long-term ROI. Once you have your list and offer testing fine-tuned, consider testing new personalization elements, USPS Informed Delivery and other tactics to further improve your ROI. |
#5 - Use Marketing Technology to Better Understand & Reach Your Audience.CONNECT |
Direct mail has taken the lead in modernizing marketing techniques in unprecedented ways. Take advantage of marketing technology in order to better reach and understand your audience. Consider a variety of tools available in order to help you target more efficiently, and learn about your audience’s habits and behaviors. Add enhancements like IP address targeting, USPS Informed Delivery and QR codes to provide your audience additional ways to respond to your direct mail marketing pieces. |
#6 - Incorporate Sustainability into Your Marketing Campaigns.EFFICIENCIES |
Be Responsible! As our natural resources continue to dwindle or get compromised, it’s never been so important to incorporate sustainability into our best practices as companies, and citizens of the world. Target efficiently and minimize waste. Modern targeting and production practices can limit direct mail quantities, improve response rates, and achieve surprisingly low net carbon impact. Even design tweaks, like making the switch from envelopes to postcard marketing, can help reduce cost and minimize waste. |
Whether you live in the city or the ‘burbs, commute or work remotely, spend your days indoors or outdoors, or prefer solitary activities to group ones, you’re likely aware that you are inundated with messaging before you’ve had time to reply to your first email.
Learn everything you can about your audience’s needs, purchase behavior, buying triggers, and media preferences. The most creative and impactful strategies starts with understanding the emotions and motivations behind the decision-making process.
Integrate online and offline strategies to optimize your campaign results. With an integrated campaign, you can reach the radio-listening, newspaper-reading, billboard viewers along with the podcast-listening, and working from home digitally-minded consumers.
Different brands will have a variety of consumer segments enter their sales funnel in many different ways. Utilize display advertising, email, print, outdoor, social channels, broadcast, and direct mail.
Direct mail offers the unique advantage of tangibility. Recipients can hold the offer in their hands, save it, and emotionally connect with it. Direct mail works especially well for verticals that need to create demand for their offer, such as banking, credit cards, fundraising, insurance, home improvement, communications, retail (catalogs), and numerous others.
The direct mail piece should should be memorable to the customer. The piece should stand out in the mail pile, perhaps through an oversized format, a textured paper stock, or a protective poly bag, to name a few. Headline copy should convey urgency to open it, whether it’s a feeling of exclusivity, a limited time offer, or some other appeal to emotions
Direct Marketing provides the perfect opportunity to continuously test and retest especially if you are tracking response and can take those learnings and optimize them. Personalization, digital response, and digital display are all marketing tactics that can be incorporated into your campaigns to help create greater user engagement and improve response.
Test something new with every marketing campaign to maximize your long-term ROI. Once you have your list and offer testing fine-tuned, consider testing new personalization elements, USPS Informed Delivery and other tactics to further improve your ROI.
Direct mail has taken the lead in modernizing marketing techniques in unprecedented ways. Take advantage of marketing technology in order to better reach and understand your audience.
Consider a variety of tools available in order to help you target more efficiently, and learn about your audience’s habits and behaviors. Add enhancements like IP address targeting, USPS Informed Delivery and QR codes to provide your audience additional ways to respond to your direct mail.
Be Responsible! As our natural resources continue to dwindle or get compromised, it’s never been so important to incorporate sustainability into our best practices as companies, and citizens of the world.
Target efficiently and minimize waste. Modern targeting and production practices can limit direct mail quantities, improve response rates, and achieve surprisingly low net carbon impact.