If you’re looking to grow your business, direct mail is one of the most effective marketing tools available. By targeting a specific audience, you can send personalized messages and create an emotional connection with customers, resulting in higher sales and better customer loyalty. Let’s take a closer look at why direct mail is so effective.
Personalization
Direct Mail allows businesses to target customers with specific messages tailored to their interests. For example, if you own a clothing boutique, you could send out postcards featuring a new line of dresses to customers who have previously purchased similar items from you. This kind of personalization is much more effective than sending out generic emails or ads that don’t speak directly to the customers' needs or interests.
Using Variable Data, Nupp Printing can change every mail piece's text and graphics to personally appeal to each of your customers on your mailing list. However, we do require you to book a consultation to set up your variable data job correctly. This consultation ensures that your marketing mail goes smoothly and easily every time you run door to door mail campaign job at Nupp Printing.
Cost-Effective
Direct mail is also incredibly cost-effective compared to other forms of advertising such as TV, radio, and print ads. You can target a specific audience and track how many people are responding to your campaigns, allowing you to adjust your strategy based on the results. Additionally, direct mail campaigns are up to five times more likely to generate leads than digital advertising alone.
Of course, a part of analyzing the cost behind a strategy is the Return on Investment (ROI) you can anticipate from it. Direct mail has one of the highest ROIs you could anticipate from a marketing campaign. According to JWM Business Services, a .5 to 2% average return rate for a direct mail marketing campaign. This is a comparatively great return rate when compared to other return-rate-based platforms and campaigns such as email. The Association of National Advertisers found email has a 1% response rate. (They also estimated marketing mail campaigns to have a response rate of 9%).
Customer Engagement
The physical nature of direct mail also helps create an emotional connection between businesses and their customers that digital methods cannot match. People are more likely to remember something they have held in their hand rather than seen online or heard on the radio. Furthermore, studies have shown that people are more likely to respond positively when presented with physical materials rather than digital ones.
A study from the USPS & Temple University in 2019 shows the effectiveness of direct mail's influence on consumers across all demographics: measuring visual attention, emotional engagement, and brain activity when participants were confronted with both digital and print advertising. While both mediums have their advantages, the print was proven to elicit a stronger emotional response from the consumer. Print advertising also proved more comprehensible and memorable, allowing participants to retain more information about the advertisement. Lastly, print advertisements made the products or services feel more desirable and valuable to the recipient than digital advertising. The study found this response was likely because tangible objects automatically have more value attached to them subconsciously. This effect is amplified when a customer gets to physically handle the tangible object as opposed to only looking at it (which makes direct mail even more effective).
Many marketers are also using a new feature that makes the connection between physical mail pieces and the digital world: Informed Delivery. Informed Delivery digitally alerts users that their mail has arrived, provides a picture of the mail piece, and can even link that picture to digital landing pages. Companies are linking different text and graphics in their mailers to drive traffic to their digital sale funnels through the power of Informed Delivery. According to Suttle-Strauss Branding, over 25% of America is already utilizing this free service from USPS and it's an advantage you don't want to miss out on as it grows in popularity.
As a business owner, using Direct Mail for your marketing efforts can help drive sales and build relationships with customers. Direct Mail provides the personalization that allows you to target specific audiences and tailored messaging and graphics. On average, it is incredibly cost-effective and lucrative when compared to other forms of advertising, making it a safer option for even inexperienced marketers. However, the most invaluable attribute of direct mail is that it can create an emotional connection between customers and your brand that remains unmatched by digital methods. With all these benefits combined, it’s no wonder why Direct Mail is one of the most powerful marketing tools available today!
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If you would like to see our associated video on how direct mail competes with digital marketing, click here.