Is Direct Mail Marketing Part Of Your Channel Strategy?

In this increasingly digital world, you might easily overlook including direct mail marketing in your channel strategy. This may be a mistake as direct mail offers the strongest marketing ROI of 112% across all mediums, followed by SMS (102%), email (93%), and paid search (88%), according to Postalytics.

Marketers use direct mail for many business goals:

• Increase Purchases (64%)
• Generate Customer Interest (63%)
• Create Brand Awareness (60%)
• Promote Customer Retention (54%)
• Winbacks (47%)
• Upsell/Cross Sell (46%)

Often consumers share promotions and discounts with family and friends generating even more buzz around products or services!

After the pandemic, consumers were looking for more emotional, personal interactions. One of the major advantages of direct mail marketing is the ability to make a personal connection. With direct mail personalization, you can target prospects by geographic area, age group, gender, lifestyle, interests and more.

Adding personalized URLs (PURLs), QR codes or unique barcodes helps to drive consumers to websites, stores, app downloads and more.

Did you know that over 91% of direct mail is opened and it is kept in the recipient’s home for 17 days on average? Apparently Americans feel more comfortable receiving direct mail over any other media and most worry less about direct mail privacy than digital media privacy.

The most common direct mail formats used by marketers in the US are:

• Newsletters & postcards- 66%
• Self-mailers-56%
• Catalog-48%
• Packages-45%

Direct mail, digital ads, email, and social media are all unique channels and consumers react differently to each. According to Postalytics, integrating digital and direct mail into your marketing campaigns increases response rates, on average, by 63%, website visits by 68% and leads by 53%.

Rising prices on ink, paper, labor, and postage are current and ongoing challenges of direct mail marketing. To spend your dollars wisely, make sure your data is accurate — deduped and using the NCOA database. Secure paper early and rethink your design. Will lighter paper do the job? Jumbo postcard vs. self-mailer format? Stick to standard sizes, where you can, to keep costs down. Look to the professionals for ways to reduce postage costs such as combined mailings and comingling. And as always test!

When it comes to direct mail, you don’t want to overlook the power of this marketing medium!