How are you adjusting your marketing strategy to accommodate the 2024 postage increase? Some businesses have raised their budgets while others are reducing their mail quantities or even the frequency of their direct mail campaigns. Data analysis can help you combat these price increases by identifying your best prospects, removing unlikely responders, locating dead zones and new markets, and examining response data.
2024 Postage Increase Solutions
Increase Budget
The first solution to the new rates is to increase your postage budget. While this solution may be the easiest one, finding the additional dollars can prove to be challenging. Do you pull money from other marketing efforts, or do you ask your client for more funds?
Reduce Quantities
The next obvious choice is to reduce either the number of households you target or the number of direct mail campaigns you send out. If you reduce the number of households, who do you remove? Are you targeting enough people to get a response?
If you reduce the number of mailings, you run the risk of your audience forgetting about you or choosing someone else. Since people are inundated with advertisements, it is easy to lose your audience’s attention if you are not communicating regularly.
Precision Targeting
A third solution to the 2024 postage increase is to be more strategic about who you target and what areas you look at. This is done through statistical data analysis where you choose to mail to the people who are most likely to respond to your offer instead of canvasing an area.
Data Analytics Solutions
Find Your Best Prospects
One of the biggest benefits of using data analysis in marketing plans is the ability to find your best prospects. If you don’t use data analysis, you are targeting every household along a mail courier route, within certain zip codes, or a random selection of households that meet your demographic selections. These options will get you in front of an audience, but there will be quite a few households in those groups who are not a good fit for your offer which generates marketing waste.
Data analysis will look at who your best customers are and then identify prospects who look like your top customers. Each prospect is scored and ranked, so you can select the households who are most likely to buy from you and use precision targeting to increase your results.
Remove Unlikely Responders
When you use data analysis to identify your best prospects, you will also discover the households in your universe who are unlikely to respond to any of your mailers. This means you can confidently choose who to remove from your mailing list and reduce your marketing waste.
Locate Dead Zones & New Markets
Not only can data scientist analyze your customers and prospects, but they can also look at your geographical data and examine your direct mail territories. These studies can identify areas you’ve been mailing to that have had zero responses, also known as dead zones. You can remove those zones from the list and reduce expenses, or you can put those funds into new areas that look just like your highly responsive neighborhoods.
Examining and Applying Response Data
With the 2024 postage increase, every penny counts. It’s important to know what’s working and what’s not, so you know how to invest your marketing dollars wisely. Through a matchback analysis, you can study your campaign response data to see who is responding. This process matches up who you targeted with who made a transaction. You can feed those results back into your data model and refine your prospect selection process.
Next Steps
Figuring out how to get the most out of your marketing dollars doesn’t have to be an overwhelming guessing game. Data analyses provide you with the information you need to make strategic decisions about who to target. If you want to know more about how you can mail smarter, reach out to our team.