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Combining direct mail and email can mean better ROI for your company
Over the last few decades, marketing has become an increasingly complicated and dynamic practice. The blanketed, one-dimensional strategies of the past that focused more on quantity rather than effectiveness are no longer adequate. Instead, successful advertising campaigns now require a multifaceted approach, relying on not just one but a variety of marketing mediums, such as direct mail and email.
Used apart, direct mail and email have been proven as powerful advertising techniques, helping several of today's most powerful businesses reach prominence. However, years of industry development has led to a more diverse arsenal of strategies, and building an effective campaign now requires more than one.
By combining direct mail and email, companies can leverage the benefits of both while counteracting their disadvantages. Advertisers can increase revenue, reduce costs and better reinforce the overall marketing message, but only if the two mediums are married properly. That means:
Having good data
How well a company records their own information could be the difference between efficiency and wasted expenses.
Since the business community rarely wastes time assimilating innovative technologies into the workplace, capturing data has become only a matter of monitoring the right screens and recording numbers. However, interpreting and converting that information into usable target data requires a bit of leg work.
Understanding an audience's makeup, including factors like age, gender and buying trends, can help advertisers decide how to approach both existing and potential customers with promotional materials. For instance, if a particular shopper has a history of making purchases online, email might be the best way to reach out to him or her.
Having perfect timing
Mailing frequency is a subject that has long since been a subject of debate between marketing professionals, Direct Marketing News reports, but one thing has always been certain: consistency is key. No matter what delivery schedule a business decides on, its goal should be to adhere to it as strictly as possible. Using both email and direct mail, marketers can actually use timing to reinforce their message and brand.
Direct mail pieces are not something that customers should receive on a daily basis. Flooding a person's mailbox with generic postcards and promotions is the perfect way to turn someone off to a product or service. Instead, advertisers should use direct mail to alert customers of special offers and events, almost conditioning shoppers to look forward to mailers.
For emails, though, marketers can take a more regular approach. DM News recommends that for every physical mail piece that's delivered, 2 to 4 emails should be sent. The contents of the message can vary greatly, and doesn't necessarily have to complement the mailer, but advertisers should capitalize on the medium's connectivity. Emails can include links to social media sites or a company's webpage.
Making direct mail and email work together is a fairly simple process that's likely to improve ROI for both mediums, but companies can further increase the combination's effectiveness by investing in mailing software. Through automation and increased organization, companies can streamline their mailing campaigns and ensure that mailers are arriving where they need to be and when there need to be there while maintaining affordability.
