If you want to maximize your campaign’s impact, try adding a digital boost to your direct mail. Digital advertising helps you surround your marketing list with your offer and build campaign momentum. It provides more opportunities for prospects to respond and allows you to accurately to attribute response rates. But the best part is, you can gain a 30%+ lift in response rates over direct mail only recipients.
Target Your Direct Mail List
Digital advertising platforms allow you to select an audience to target. You can narrow this audience down by location and some general demographics, but they may or may not be the same people to whom you sent a mail piece. However, direct digital marketing allows you to specifically target the households on your direct mail list. This eliminates unnecessary marketing waste and enables you to focus your marketing spend on the households you choose.
Build Momentum
Adding digital advertising to your direct mail campaign creates momentum. When prospects see your advertisement on multiple platforms, your offer becomes more memorable and credible. You can add emails, social, display, connected TV, and programmatic radio ads to your campaign. Choose platforms that make sense for your particular audience and make sure each channel is driving the audience to the same campaign. Be careful not to inundate your audience, but create a good media plan that allows you to stay consistently in front of them.
Create More Opportunities to Respond
Direct mail often provides multiple impressions per household all by itself. Since recipients physically handle it, the impressions have a stronger impact. Recipients view it as more trustworthy than other forms of advertising, but people need to be reminded to act. This is where a digital boost can really make an impact.
You can use emails to send out timely reminders that an offer is expiring or a price increase is approaching. Social ads and display catch people’s attention, serve as reminders, and offer more opportunities to respond. Whenever a prospect clicks on your ad, they are direct to a landing page where they can immediately make a purchase or sign up for more information.
Real Campaign Attribution
When campaigns are siloed into digital and traditional channels, response attribution becomes messy. Do you give credit to the first channel they responded to or to the channel through which they made a transaction? What if they didn’t use the PURL or QR CODE but typed in the website directly? Were they targeted on all channels or only a couple?
Adding digital to your direct mail list means you know exactly who was targeted and which channels were used to reach them. All marketing channels are working together to move the prospect further down the sales funnel. When a transaction is made, you can match up the response with your direct mail list. Your responses are no longer getting attributed to the wrong channel, but are identified as part of the direct marketing campaign.
Better Results
Adding a digital boost to your direct mail campaign provides a lift in response rates that has a compounding effect. The first month, you should see an 8-12% lift over the direct mail only response rates. The second month should show a 12-15% lift, and by the third round, you should see a 30%+ lift. We have even seen a 50%+ lift in response rates after 6 consecutive months.
Consumers typically use multiple channels in their buying process, so meeting them where they are increases the likelihood of a transaction. If you decide to test out digital services, keep in mind that it takes time to build trust on new platforms. We recommend testing it out for 3-4 months in order to see the best results.
If you would like to learn more about how digital can increase your direct mail response rates, send us your questions.