Going where digital can’t.
You can’t rely on digital alone to drive your SaaS marketing. Think about it: Social is an overcrowded pay-to-play field. People delete hundreds of emails in one go as they clean out their inbox. Digital is valuable, but does it deliver everything you need all by itself?
Direct mail is highly effective — even for tech-centered SaaS businesses. Integrated with a robust digital marketing strategy, direct mail can deliver big results for your SaaS.
Why direct mail?
Direct mail is effective. While marketers may pay more attention to the brightly designed Facebook campaigns, the ever-present Google Ads, and the drip-drip-drip of email marketing, direct mail is a stealth marketing hero.
Regardless of industry, direct mail gets higher response rates than email. Direct mail delivered an average response rate of 9% for house lists and 4.9% for prospect lists last year. Compare this to email, social and paid search, which each gets an average response rate of about 1%.
Direct mail is effective on its own, but it’s especially valuable when it bridges the gap between offline and digital marketing campaigns. It’s one element of your strategy to build effective, original creative across all your channels. Research shows consumers spend, on average, 25% more when businesses combine direct mail and email marketing.
And this goes for SaaS businesses. Whether you’re in the B2B or B2C space, direct mail draws in previously unresponsive leads and develops a sales pipeline for enterprise and mid-market accounts.
The Process
When it comes to direct mail, you need a system. You need a strategy. You need to be creative. And most of all, you need results.
We know – it can sound daunting. But over the years, we’ve fine-tuned our process to deliver exactly that.
We bring rapid scaling to direct mail clients to deliver better performance
What are the core components of creating a direct mail campaign that gets results for SaaS companies? While every industry is different, we’ve found a unique approach that delivers (no pun intended) results.
- Establish, define, and refine your campaign goals: We help you pinpoint on your objectives and establish the metrics that will define success.
- Strategic planning: Understanding your audience, their needs, and the key benefits of your product gives us the foundation to design useful tests.
- Targeting: Which mailing lists? Which segments? We identify which offer the most promise for your direct mailing campaign.
- Creative development: We build a detailed brief for our talented designers and copywriters. The result? Compelling, engaging, and response-driven direct mail.
- Flawless execution: Logistics is everything in executing a direct mail campaign. No schedule delays, no last-minute budget surprises, and no errors.
- Detailed campaign analysis: Success is in the numbers. We use our proprietary algorithm that helps you refine your projects.
ROI for SaaS
SaaS is a different ball game than other industries. There’s no physical product, it’s a crowded marketplace, and there’s a lot of information.
Effective approaches for efficient results
No two clients are identical. That’s why we tailor your campaigns to meet your unique goals. Two ways that we approach direct mail projects to boost response rates? Leap and Repeat for accelerating your direct mail testing and “beat the control”.
Leap and Repeat
Testing is critical to effective direct mailing. It allows you to control for audience, offers, and messaging, helping you triangulate the best approaches. But testing can be time-consuming and delay the results you want (and need) to see. That’s when we implement our Leap and Repeat methodology.
Leap and Repeat speeds up the process with three-drop testing and planning to eliminate delays while still delivering breakthrough results, along with predictable performance.
Beat the Control
You’ve done direct mail but haven’t been wowed with the results.
Sometimes, it helps to step back and evaluate.
That’s our goal with our Beat the Control approach. We use previous mailing performance as the baseline and refine a control package that delivers the ROI you’re going for. This approach is like a shot of espresso to your direct mail program. (Want numbers? 92% of our packages have beat existing controls when tested directly against them.)
Direct Mail For B2B SaaS Companies
What are your goals for B2B marketing? Get noticed, move them along the sales funnel, and sustain your relationships. You pull out email lists, draft social campaigns, and hammer out the white papers.
These approaches are tried-and-true, but are they going to accomplish that very first goal of catching people’s attention? Direct mail marketing is more memorable than digital marketing: Customers are 77% more likely to remember what they read in print over what they see on a screen
But to be effective in a B2B space, direct mail campaigns need to be laser-focused. Successful campaigns need to operate with an awareness of the sales funnel, keep squeaky clean data sets, and always lead with value.
While direct mail might feel old school, it pairs well with newer strategic approaches. Account-based marketing for B2B companies is a popular (and effective) approach to build relationships with clients, not just generate leads.
Direct Mail For B2C SaaS Companies
Fact: People spend more time engaging with the contents of their mailbox than their in-box. For B2C SaaS companies, this higher engagement translates into more opportunity. And not just opportunity for sales—though we’re sure you’d like that, too. Direct mail supports goals like brand awareness and customer loyalty nurturing.
But higher engagement also means higher expectations. One thing that means is personalization. A recent Marketo study found that 79% of consumers are willing to engage with an offer. The catch? It has to accurately reflect their relationship with you. (So no one-size-fits-all direct mail blasts, please.)
SaaS has a major advantage here: technology companies are pros at gathering consumer data. So put it to good use.
Direct mail also provides a compliance-friendly approach to marketing. Marketers shoulder their fair share of privacy compliance obligations. But unlike getting consent for digitally focused privacy regulations, direct mail offers a straightforward path for consent plus the benefits of focused, well-crafted content.
Use Your Direct Mail Campaigns to Grow
Feel as if you’re looking down the line of a big direct mail smorgasbord and don’t know where to start? Here are staples in a healthy, balanced direct mail program.
Build Better Leads (and Better Impressions)
Leads, much like that succulent on your office desk, need some love to grow. If they’ve engaged with you before, don’t let that interest wither. Direct mail engages and re-engages potential leads by giving them something that catches their attention. From engaging top-of-the-funnel postcard mailers to branded promotional boxes to qualified leads, there are options for each point of your nurture sequence.
Word to the wise: always include a strong call-to-action – schedule a demo, set up a virtual meeting, start or extend a trial are all worthy CTA choices.
Combine Old School and New School Mail
Direct mail AND email working together? This duo delivers results for businesses both in the B2B and B2C spaces. Thanks to the power of CRMs and automated marketing, there are lots of ways to pair up the two channels.
- Draw in email non-responders with direct mail
- Add a little direct mail to drip email campaigns
- Use email to follow up on direct mail
- Prospect with direct mail, follow up with email
Promote Events (Both Virtual and In-Person)
Promoting an event virtually doesn’t mean you need to stick to digital marketing. In fact, virtual events give you an even better reason to include direct mail for your SaaS. Direct mail adds a physical element to the much-less-tangible virtual format. Send welcome packets with flyers, brochures, and schedules. Send swag bags with your branded promotional items.
Our virtual event space is a new frontier—don’t limit your creativity!
Let’s Get Started!
Direct mail campaigns are impactful, even more so when they’re combined with a marketing strategy that pairs direct mail with digital initiatives. Bridge the gap between print and digital campaigns.
Want to see how much business you could generate with a direct mail campaign? Check out our ROI calculator.
