Programmatic Direct Mail® (PDM) has become an essential part of an omnichannel marketing strategy — and for good reason. PDM provides the perfect opportunity to reach prospects and customers across all stages of the customer journey. And it does so in a place where they’re likely to convert: at home.
Programmatic Direct Mail blends digital and direct mail to convert consumers and move them along the customer journey. It does this by turning their recent online signals and intent into digitally enhanced direct mail.
Below we’ll discuss how you can use Programmatic Direct Mail throughout all customer journey stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Re-engagement.
Incorporating Programmatic Direct Mail into the Customer Journey
Awareness
Awareness is the first step in the customer journey. It’s when a potential customer identifies a need or want for something and becomes acquainted with your product or service. The prospect then takes steps to learn more about what you do.
The main goal in this phase is to educate the customer and bring awareness to your brand. PebblePost’s Lookalikes Product is one of the best ways to identify high-value prospects. Then, you can provide them with information and content about your product or service via high-quality direct mail.
With Lookalikes, you can identify new prospects who look and act like your most valuable customers. Plus, they will be in the consideration window for a product or service like yours.
This helps you reach customers at home, where nearly 90% of purchasing decisions occur. Home is also where they have access to resources and are situationally predisposed to learn more about what you do.
One of the biggest goals in the awareness stage is to push your prospects online (or in-store) to further move them along the customer journey and make a sale. Programmatic Direct Mail is one of the best ways to do this because you can offer a QR code or a personalized link on your postcards to drive prospects from offline to online.
Additionally, your awareness efforts are tracked and measured with the PebblePost Transaction Match, ensuring that you can prove performance — the end goal for any marketer.
Consideration
When buyers enter the consideration stage of the customer journey, they have identified a need and are learning about products or services that can provide them a specific solution.
The consideration stage is ultimately when you want to identify prospects that are most “Persuadable” and interested in your brand and get them over the finish line to become converting customers.
There are a couple of ways to use Programmatic Direct Mail during the consideration stage of the customer journey. Some examples are:
- Website Visitors: Use PDM Retargeting to identify your anonymous site visitors, and reach them at home with a piece of relevant, impactful mail within 2-3 days of their site activity, when your brand is still top of mind
- Abandoned Carts: Use PDM Retargeting to follow up with customers who abandoned their cart by sending them a promotion code to encourage them to convert. Since PDM Retargeting can be triggered based on activity, you can seamlessly reach consumers while also taking advantage of the PebblePost optimization algorithm to filter out those who have already converted, maximizing efficiency.
- Promotions or New Products: Remind your current customers about upcoming sales or promotions, or promote a product line or service with Graph Mail, by quickly reaching a subset of customers from your CRM or email databases with relevant, personalized direct mail.
Decision
When prospects reach the decision stage of the customer journey, arm them with the information they need to make a purchase decision.
Your goal as a brand should be to stand out and position yourself as the right choice in this stage. Brands that incorporate Programmatic Direct Mail into this stage of the customer journey see the best performance by offering promo codes or seasonally aligning to holidays or tentpoles (for example, Black Friday), which act as an excellent catalyst for consumers to complete their purchase.
Parachute, a home goods brand, did just that for a Black Friday sale in 2019. Parachute used Lookalikes to achieve its customer acquisition goal. You can read more about their Programmatic Direct Mail journey here.
Re-Engagement
The customer journey doesn’t stop once a purchase is complete. The re-engagement stage is just as important as the others to maintain a connection with your customers and drive your marketing objectives.
During this stage, your customers are testing your product or service and deciding whether they want to buy again.
Graph Mail is the ideal product to leverage Programmatic Direct Mail in the post-decision state for customer retention and re-engagement.
To do this, segment your CRM to follow up with customers post-purchase to up-sell or cross-sell additional products or services or reach lapsed customers for winback programs.
Another way to use the PDM Platform and Graph Mail is to identify your email subscribers who have not opened an email, verify their household addresses, and reach them at home with a high-quality mail piece.
Graph Mail is a perfect complement to your re-engagement campaigns because you can quickly and efficiently reach subsets of customers, leveraging the PDM Platform’s supply and logistics network to get into the mail stream within 24 hours.
In Conclusion
Programmatic Direct Mail can help supercharge your customer journey and is one of the best ways to reach your prospects, no matter where they are at in their journey.
Whether you’re educating them in the awareness stage or upselling them in the post-decision stage, personalized direct mail helps to connect you with your customers in a unique and relevant way. It also helps build trust between your brand and your prospects at every stage.
So, as you think about different ways to improve or revamp your customer journey, consider Programmatic Direct Mail. It is a seamless way to integrate real-time online intent data with impactful direct mail — and meet your ROI goals.
To learn more about Programmatic Direct Mail or PebblePost and how it can complement your marketing efforts, please reach out to us at hello@pebblepost.com.
