Direct Mail Can Supercharge Your Multichannel Marketing Strategy

Incorporating direct mail into a multichannel marketing approach allows you to connect with more leads, build brand awareness, increase your response rates, and streamline your message

There was a time when marketers questioned the validity of direct mail, especially as digital marketing practices were on the rise. But today, as the digital climate becomes more and more cluttered, we are seeing direct-mail marketing make a strong resurgence.

Direct mail on its own delivers a much higher response rate and ROI than other marketing channels, but when used as a component in a multichannel approach, the results are even better.

What is multichannel marketing?

Consumers interact with a variety of media every day, so it makes sense for marketers to engage with them across those mediums. Multichannel marketing is the practice of using various online and offline channels for the same campaign to reach prospective and current customers at pivotal points in their buying journey. Using this approach offers opportunities to connect with more leads while simultaneously keeping them aware of you.

Some of the benefits of a strong multichannel strategy are:

• Increased brand awareness
• Higher levels of engagement
• Better response rates
• More customer touchpoints
• Allows for consistent messaging

Here are three ways to include direct mail into your multichannel marketing strategies:

1. Combine direct mail with IP Targeting

An IP address is like a location-centric identifier associated with any device that is connected to the internet. IP Targeting is an advertising practice that delivers personalized marketing content to desktops or mobile devices based on their physical location. Combining direct mail with IP targeting allows marketers to concurrently send a direct-mail piece and corresponding digital ads to the same recipient.

The main idea behind this approach is to build brand awareness via digital ads, creating a higher likelihood that the recipient will open and review the direct-mail offer. It also allows the recipient the option to click directly on the digital ad to receive the offer. Either way, allowing these two channels to feed off of one another has been known to increase response rates by upwards of 200 percent.

2. Combine direct mail with social media

With over 750 million active users on Facebook, marketers are spending a significant amount of time and resources trying to reach potential customers on that and other social platforms. While this is certainly a worthwhile strategy, there is a substantial missed opportunity when social media targeting and direct mail efforts aren’t combined.

Social media and direct mail can be used together in several ways. For example, you can use social media to create brand awareness and build excitement for an upcoming direct-mail offer, include social icons on your direct-mail pieces to encourage engagement and shares, or even replicate direct-mail offers on social media pages.

3. Combine direct mail with email

Many mailing list owners will append their mail files with email addresses allowing an integrated, multi-touch strategy. Mailers can test the DM‑EM cadence to determine the best number and timing of touches in their prospect marketing. Another value of this combination is that it gives marketers 100% control over timing and message consistency to maximize testing opportunities.

When it comes to customer marketing, if you’ve been depending on an email-only touch strategy, then you owe to yourself to reverse append your file with physical addresses to test the power of mail. The introduction of a new, physical channel that gets attention can bring your non-responsive customers to life.

When combined, these two mediums can strengthen marketing efforts and provide valuable insights to help shape future campaigns. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Use social data to advance direct-mail targeting. Social data can be used to refine direct-mail lists. You can gather those metrics by targeting users who engage with your online ads. Those who click on social ads are relaying interest, and therefore, they’re usually more apt to provide offline information. Consider adding a field for a physical mailing address on the landing pages associated with your social ads. This will allow you to send similarly branded direct mail, which can boost your response rate and strengthen your message.

• Use your mailing list to create better-targeted social ads. Certain social sites, like Facebook, make it easy to upload your physical mailing list to find local prospects within their database. Try using Facebook’s Direct Response Advertising platform for step-by-step instructions, along with guidance on choosing the right ads for your particular objectives.

• Use social insights to dictate future strategies. There is an array of tools associated with social media that can help you segment, categorize, and target users any way you want. Review those behaviors and demographics to track which messages and designs resonate with which audiences, and then apply those findings to both online and offline marketing efforts. Just remember to deliver them across both channels and measure which ones work best.

A strong multichannel strategy is the best way to create a hyper-targeted message delivered to the right audience at the right time, which is all you need to transform a good campaign into a great one. Direct mail combines physical and emotional impact with a data-driven approach to drive leads and culminate the perfect match.

Want to add direct mail into your next marketing campaign? Drop us a line.