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4 Ways to Improve Your Direct Mail Marketing

Direct mail marketing continues to be a mainstay in marketing budgets and for good reason: it’s effective (when done right). In fact, 83% of purchases are influenced by direct mail, whereas 88% of crucial purchase decisions are made at home.

Since consumers have been at home more recently, direct mail marketing outreach is the perfect way to reach your audience. With 80% of millennials reporting that they pay attention to direct mail and 50% stating they ignore digital ads, it further cements our position that there’s one place consumers simply can’t ignore: their mailbox. 

The key to unlocking this audience and driving your brand’s bottom line is with high-performing direct mail. High-performing direct mail is relevant to the consumer, easily accessible, and quickly delivered — no small undertaking, for sure.

PebblePost’s Programmatic Direct Mail® (PDM®) platform assists with creating and delivering high-performing direct mail. You, too, can see tremendous growth and hit your ROI goals this year. Here are four things you can do to improve your direct mail marketing and exceed your revenue goals.

4 Ways to Improve Your Direct Mail Marketing

1. Add Digital Behavioral Data to Your Attributes

Customer acquisition direct mail marketing programs have been around for decades, and for a good reason — they work! Using digital behavioral data, such as recent demographic and psychographic attributes, is a powerful way to identify potential customers with similar characteristics as your ideal customer. Enhance your customer acquisition by programs by layering in real-time digital online shopper behavior over those psychographic and demographic attributes.   

Online browsing and purchasing behaviors can act as significant signals into the consideration window of a consumer (if they’re in the market for our product/service), ensure your direct mail is relevant to the consumer, and increase the likelihood to take action.

2. Data Hygiene: Clean Your Lists!

Cleaning existing customer data files as close to sending mail as possible is crucial to ensuring good data hygiene. A clean list helps to target your audience better and specifically tailor your offers or promotions. 

Having a clean list can also save money in the long run. For example, if you are running a campaign to acquire new customers, an unclean list could make an all too common mistake — sending a direct mail piece that your recipient can’t redeem because it’s for new customers only.

Not only does that drive your direct mail marketing costs up (marketing to an existing customer for a customer acquisition program), it runs the risk of creating a rift in your customers’ trust in your brand. For example, if they consider themselves a loyal customer and receive an offer for “new customers only,” they may seek other solutions.  

Another hidden issue of poor data hygiene is its impact on your current mail lead time. You may be cleaning data files for existing customers before sending direct mail. But if your current mail lead time is 2–3 months, you run the risk of it being outdated, duplicated, or stale by the time it enters the mail stream. 

The PDM Platform alleviates these issues by quickly scrubbing your customer data files as soon as 24 hours before heading to print. This ensures minimal leakage and that your tailored offers align with your customer segment. 

Additionally, the PDM Platform uses other standard data hygiene practices. It processes all address files through the National Change of Address the day before sending mail. This ensure that addresses are the most up-to-date and accurate. Offers are sent to one address, one time — regardless of how many people live in a household.

3. Find and Implement a Flexible Platform 

If you’re running multiple direct mail marketing campaigns with different objectives, having a scalable platform that acts as an all-in-one solution sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? 

The PDM platform is a full-stack solution that manages all of those headache-inducing tasks, from frequency management to data to printing and mailing logistics, which all have a significant impact on the performance of our campaigns.

Because the PDM Platform supports the full customer journey from acquisition to retention and re-engagement, you can frequency cap across all your campaigns, regardless of audience. This helps you prevent duplicate mailings and increase cost-effectiveness. 

You can run your winback campaigns simultaneously with your customer acquisition or retargeting campaigns without having to worry about popping up too often in your prospects’ mailboxes.

PebblePost also manages frequency on the household level so that if both you and your spouse are potential customers of a product or service, your household would only receive one mail piece to maximize cost efficiency. 

As far as flexibility goes, we get it. Objectives change, business priorities shift — and so do your marketing budgets. You need a direct mail marketing solution that can adapt to meet your changing needs. Since the PDM platform is integrated directly with a print and logistics network that prints and sends mail every day, seven days a week, our platform is flexible and eliminates historic long lead times, building models and printing and mailing within 24–48 hours. 

PDM campaigns are customized to your specific needs, making it one of the most flexible direct mail marketing platforms available.

4. Identify Anonymous Site Visitors  

Another way to improve your direct mail marketing in 2021 is by identifying — and capitalizing on — anonymous site visitors. You already spend a good portion of your marketing budget to drive awareness and drive traffic to your site, but what can you do to re-engage or connect with your visitors once they leave without making a purchase? 

PebblePost can help with this by identifying your anonymous online site visitors’ household addresses using our proprietary Data Asset, the PebblePost Graph. 

The PebblePost Graph connects billions of real-time online intent signals with household addresses in a secure and privacy-compliant way. This ensures that you’re only connecting with prospects who want to hear from you.

The Graph also matches up to 70% of your anonymous site visitors with a household address. You can then automatically — and seamlessly — send relevant, personalized direct mail within days of their initial site visit. Because they’re still in the consideration window of making a purchase, this in turn helps you hit your ROI goals. 

In Conclusion

There are various ways to improve your direct mail marketing, and this article only shared a few ways to sharpen your existing toolkit — there are many more! As you think about other ways to improve your direct mail marketing strategies, consider Programmatic Direct Mail as a solution.

To learn more about Programmatic Direct Mail and how it can complement your marketing efforts, please reach out at hello@pebblepost.com.

Free Guide: PebblePost's Guide to Programmatic Direct Mail

Download our short guide and learn the who, what, why, and how of Programmatic Direct Mail.

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