It’s no secret that direct mail does not have to live on its own. In fact, as seen time and time again, incorporating direct mail as part of a multichannel campaign can improve performance.
In the next two blog posts, tips 4 and 5, we’ll highlight recent advances with data science, production technology, and delivery logistics that can help your direct mail to work harder than ever
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. But before diving into all of them, test your way in.
Personalization in direct mail allows the marketer to connect with the recipient on a deeper level. Frequently, a call to action on a direct mail piece is to drive a user to a campaign’s landing page. An innovative way to get your future customer to engage is by personalizing that landing page.
Personalized URLS, also known as PURLs, are a unique weapon and an essential tool in providing personalized experiences and top-notch attribution reporting.
PURLs that are unique for that specific user or subset of users. PURLs can be generated automatically and are often nothing more than adding a username or number to the end of a web address.
When the user goes to the address, the information on that page is custom populated to appeal to them and their preferences. With the right AI on your side, these landing pages and the resulting customization can be done seamlessly, from the moment a new IP address reaches your site to the moment they receive your mailing and type in the associated PURL.
In the last 5 years, the use of digital response devices in direct mail has doubled. Digital response devices include forms of response such as websites, landing pages, social, QR codes, apps, and voice-activated calls to action (VACTA). In fact, in 2021, QR Codes were the most used digital form of response.
The use of QR codes grew in popularity at the start of the pandemic and will likely continue to increase in usage for a number of reasons. First, they greatly simplify the response process for the user as they don’t require the user to key in a URL and they can be personalized. From the marketer’s standpoint, QR codes allow you to track user data and understand what’s important to your audience.
Place online ads on household devices at the same time that mail arrives.
Modern tracking software makes it possible and easy for companies to track a user’s IP address – a number that identifies the unique network connection at a household or business. Most of us are already aware that this can happen with cookies and other digital footprints. However, you can take this even further: not only does this let you monitor the activity of a specific user on a particular machine, but you can also match that digital IP address to a user’s physical address and send them a direct mail piece. This ensures a multi-channel, multi-touch approach.
IP Matching and Targeting Enables Marketers to:
Marketers can also build out a display campaign that matches IP addresses to physical addresses on a data-driven prospect file. By matching addresses and serving ads to users programmatically, marketers can reach qualified prospects on high-profile sites at a low cost. When direct mail is fully integrated into the campaign strategy, it can have a tremendous effect on ROI.
Unlike digital alone, appending digital targeting to a mail address allows marketers to more accurately report attribution and optimize campaign over campaign.
After running the same seasonal lawn care marketing campaign year after year, Patriot Lawn Care came to BKM Marketing looking to improve response rate and ROI.
Based on BKM's prior success with in assisting lawn care marketing companies with customer fatigue, in a very crowded seasonal industry, BKM recommended testing a variety of multitouch and multichannel strategies.
With everything from testing response rate and ROI based on sending direct mail 1x vs. 2nd, to targeting mailing addresses with digital ads, to comparing the results of targeting direct mail flyers with 4x digital ads vs. none at all, to testing a variety of creative sizes and styles--BKM was able to boost Patriot Lawn Care's overall sales over 28% and solidify monumental marketing strategy successes with uncovering an 87% lift in sales for those targeted by digital ads and a 53% lift in those two received the same mailer 2x over 1x.
Overall Sales +28%Overall Patriot lawn had an 28.3% lift in sales from prospect records between the 2020 and 2022 spring campaigns. |
Digital Ads +87%Across all records targeted in the 2022 direct mail campaign, incorporating targeted digital ads drove an 87.10% lift in sales. |
Direct Mail +53%Among prospect records, mailing records twice drove a 53.15% lift in sales vs. records mailed once. |
And stay tuned for next week's Tip #5 | Take advantage of marketing technology to better reach and understand your audience...
Sources:
The Association of National Advertisers(ANA), “ANA/DMA Response Rate Report 2018”, https://www.ana.net.
LOB and Comeremedia, State of Direct Mail, Consumer Insights.
Who's Mailing What, "25 Direct Mail Trends for 2021", https://www.whosmailingwhat.com/blog/direct-mail-trends-2021.