By Cheryl Strege, The Partner Marketing Group
After my 85-year old father learned to text, the letters from my parents slowed down. I had always enjoyed spotting that one piece of personal mail. My father’s eloquent script on the envelope easily recognizable and loaded with newspaper clippings and other tidbits about the weather, the cat, my siblings, and friends of the family.
I confess – my guilty pleasure is direct mail. According to Wikipedia, a guilty pleasure is something that one enjoys despite feeling that it is not generally held in high regard.
Most marketers today would likely categorize direct mail as “not generally held in high regard” due to easier and less expensive forms of communicating with prospects and customers such as email, social media, and the like. But I would advocate that direct mail can be a vital and important part of your marketing strategy.
How to add direct mail back into your marketing mix:
- Is your list ready? By now you should have an extensive prospect list in your CRM system that you actively market to on a regular basis. If for whatever reason you feel the need to supplement your campaigns by purchasing a list, direct mail lists are MUCH easier to obtain than email lists. Email lists, by their very nature, are not opt-in and can subject your company to severe penalties. If you are in Canada, the CASL rules for spamming are especially strict.
- Get personal. As with email, direct mail can be targeted, personalized, and relevant to a particular need or challenge. With today’s ability to print on-demand, there’s little reason to throw 5,000 flyers in the mail and hope for the best, also called “spray and pray”. Pick a subset of your target audience such as former clients, your most loyal customers or your best prospects and focus on delivering a fresh memorable message.
- Integrate it! As marketers we have so many tactics at our disposal. Use direct mail in conjunction with email, social posts, online ads, re-targeting, events, etc. We already know that the more times a prospect sees our message, the greater the likelihood of a response.
- Be unique. As with my father’s letters, direct mail can really stand out amongst the pile of “generic” mail that hits the desk each week. You can easily customize smaller batches of mail with a unique theme or look and have them delivered in packaging that is guaranteed to get attention.
Direct mail can become your customers’ guilty pleasure too! Need some help creating a targeted marketing campaign? Talk to us at info@ThePartnerMarketingGroup.com about a memorable, personalized, integrated campaign.
P.S. I still get letters from my father, just not as many. And now that he’s figured out how to use the AARP version of a tablet, he’s unstoppable!
