With marketing budgets under scrutiny, and concerns about slowing consumer spending, inflation and increasing costs, how can you ensure that your direct marketing campaigns remain highly effective?
A study showed that adding direct mail to an omnichannel marketing campaign boosts performance by 63% if it's well-branded, integrated, and personalised. In addition, Marketreach and WARC discovered that customer campaigns are 75% more likely to report profit uplifts when mail is in the marketing mix. And offline direct mail is 49% more memorable than email as a channel?
Marketers use direct mail as an alternative to oversaturated digital channels and as a way to combine offline and online into an omnichannel marketing strategy. Even the big online brands, including Google, Sky and Shopify, use Direct mail to engage and boost effective results.
Consumers today are exposed to hundreds of marketing messages daily, and cutting through this noise to ensure a share of voice is the new challenge for marketers. Rising to this challenge requires innovation in creativity and the media strategy, which acts as the vehicle to land messages in the right place at the right time.
To help make your direct mail direct marketing successful, we have put together some pointers that follow the old 40/40/20 rule.
- 20% of a direct mail campaign's success rate is based on content, design, and timing.
- 40% depends on the offer.
- 40% on reaching the right audience.
Reaching the right audience
An up-to-date database means less returned mail and reduced waste, which is better for the environment and your budget. Data cleansing is the easy way to reach the right audience by running suppressions on customer databases to remove deceased, lapsed, duplicate and gone away records. In addition, we can help you find potential customers with a remarkable resemblance to your very best customer. We would segment your data to target a particular audience and personalise the message, so it is relevant to the audience.
The marketing offer
Suppose your offer is highly valued for your target audience, aligned with your business and marketing strategy, exclusive, and delivered at a specific time in the buyer's journey. In that case, you've got to worry about getting your offer noticed.
Eye-tracking research shows that people scan letters, mail, emails and phone screens in predictable patterns, such as in the shape of the letter "F." This means that you can predict which areas of your mailer people's eyes will land on. And those areas are where you want your offer. So in partnership with MarketReach we offer eye-tracking software to understand where your audience is gazing at your mail. We can then review, improve and deliver a more impactful creative.
If you've ever managed an online campaign, you know the importance of running A/B or split tests to compare how your target audience responds to different versions; that same principle of A/B testing can also apply to direct mail campaigns. As a starting point, A/B test your offer, message, images, and CTA. In addition, A/B testing different mail formats, audiences and timings can significantly improve the response rates, insights, and campaign ROI. The options are endless.
Content, design, and timing
While unusual shapes and sizes may be eye-catching, posting them will increase your costs. This also applies to the stock and packaging materials. For example, a heavier-weight paper may look and feel better quality, but the extra weight could also push your postage costs up.
We can send your campaign through a whole host of companies that offer different benefits and price points. For example, many mailing companies offer reduced rates for pre-sorted mail campaigns, as it saves them time. Also, make sure you try consolidating campaigns into larger mailings when possible so that you can reap the bulk buying benefits.
The Royal Mail offers special incentives to make your campaigns work even harder.
- Advertising Mail - Whether new to mail, wanting to send more or testing how to make mail work harder, find out how you can earn up to 15% postage credit discount.
- Business Mail - Test a new mail campaign, and you can get up to 30% off your postage. It could be as easy as testing a new format or creative.
- Publishing Mail - Earn postage credits for sending the same publishing volume as last year.
Intuitively, direct mail grabs the recipient's attention and raises awareness because no other medium is such an integral part of a consumer's day - it is physical and tangible. No other form of advertising receives the same level of sensory attention as a letter or mailpack that is picked up, opened, held in hand and read before being filed by the fruit bowl or pinned to the noticeboard in the kitchen.
As a marketer, you know that direct mail can play an essential role in your overall marketing strategy.
So we've written this guide to help you with your next campaign.
Check out our guide to Direct Mail. It's not complicated!
If you want to supercharge your DM campaigns, contact the team, who’ll be happy to discuss some ideas.