In a world of social media, email, and text-based marketing, you might be missing out on something that will make a huge impact on your business. No, it’s not more targeted advertising. It’s direct mail marketing.
Wait, what is direct mail marketing, exactly?
It’s exactly what it sounds like: marketing to your audience directly via the mail. However, there’s a fine line between creating an ad that resonates with your audience and just stuffing mailboxes with more junk mail.
If you’re looking to boost your marketing efforts with direct mail, read on.
What Is Direct Mail Marketing?
Believe it or not, direct mail marketing has been around for almost as long as the printing press! It’s a time-tested way to reach customers (and potential customers) directly where they live, and it’s something any good integrated marketing campaign can’t be without.
Direct mail marketing is a marketing method that directly reaches a company’s target audience at home via physical mailings. This could be anything from postcards to brochures, catalogs to free samples. It could also involve pizza, but we’ll get to that later.
When deciding on ways to market your business, you’d be remiss to count out physical direct mail marketing and use only digital methods of advertising. Sure, a great Facebook ad campaign can really boost your sales, but between ad blocker browser extensions and banner blindness, there’s no way to guarantee the right people will see them.
However, if you have the three major components of a good piece of direct mail down, you should see higher conversion rates than with indirect methods of marketing like search engine optimization and billboards.
Benefits of Direct Mail Marketing
Direct mail marketing reaches your company’s audience directly at home instead of crossing your fingers and hoping they see your paid search ads. As mentioned earlier, sending actual mail to your customers will put you ahead of your competition who may only be using digital ads.
The major benefits of postcard marketing cannot be understated. With postcard marketing, you can personalize your offers and entice the customer to buy your product with special sales and deals only available for those who receive the postcard.
Another great benefit of direct mail marketing is that it’s almost certain to reach its destination. Slow as it may be at times, the post office nearly always gets the mail into the hands of the person it is addressed to.
Compare that with emails, which can end up in a person’s spam folder or be deleted immediately even before it’s opened. Just think about how many unread promotional emails you have sitting in your inbox right now!
What to Know Before You Create Your Direct Mail Campaign
There are several types of direct mail marketing that can work for any business, but you first need to know what will best resonate with your customers. Like most things in marketing, there’s no such thing as one size fits all.
There are a few questions you can ask yourself while narrowing down what your audience wants and how to reach your customers:
- Who are your current customers?
- Who are your repeat customers? What do they have in common?
- What need does your audience have that you can solve with your product or service?
Once you have your target audience identified and know what types of advertising they relate to the most, you can then plan your direct mail marketing campaign.
Direct Mail Marketing Ideas
If you’re wondering, “Should I be mailing my customers?” you’re asking the wrong question. Of course, no one likes to get junk mail, and that might be clouding your judgment a bit.
However, if you’re using direct mail marketing to send something to your customers that they’ll really value, you shouldn’t worry about them thinking you’re sending junk mail! One great idea is to send samples, if possible, with a significant discount on your product or services.
You can track how many people your mailer reached by using a unique promo code only found on the postcard, brochure, or whatever you decide is the best type of mailer.
For the most part, most direct mail marketing campaigns will use postcards to deliver the message to the audience. Some of the more common things you’ll see on these postcards are coupons and deals.
Other types of direct mailers are letters, which tend to work better for nonprofits looking for donations, and brochures, which are great for brands selling a number of products that their audience may not have known about yet.
Unique Direct Mail Marketing Examples
There are also more unique types of direct mailing pieces that marketers use. These tend to be bulky and not as cost-effective as postcards, but when used in small quantities to target very specific customers or potential customers, they’re a great idea. Some examples of these include:
- Fancy cookies and other treats
- Personalized coffee mugs or tumblers
- Notebooks, pens, and other stationery
- A printed and bound pitch deck
- Pizza from a local pizzeria with the brand’s name spelled in pepperoni
Okay, that last one might be a little out there, but it would absolutely catch the recipient’s attention, wouldn’t it?
Final Thoughts on Direct Mail Marketing
So, you now know the answer to, “What is direct mail marketing?” It’s time to get started on your direct mail marketing campaign! Research your audience, find out what they want, and create an offer they can’t resist.
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