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Direct mail marketing has been around for a long time, and it continues to be one of the best ways to reach your customers and share impactful messages about your brand. However, to make sure that the benefits of your direct mail marketing campaigns outweigh the costs, it's essential to use a marketing strategy that combines digital and traditional marketing tools. Keep reading to learn more about the costs and benefits of direct mail marketing campaigns.
The costs of direct mail can vary quite a bit depending on the reason you're sending it. Thinking through the purpose and scale of your campaign can help you get a better sense of what the overall cost will be. Some factors to consider include the price of:
As technology continues to improve, you can take advantage of real-time marketing analytics that improve your market segmentation and targeting efforts, which can drastically cut down on the costs of direct mail marketing. Marketing automation also offers a smart way to save money and manual effort, increasing direct mail ROI on your campaigns.
Want to dive deeper into the topic of budgets and direct mail? Listen to our Lobcast Podcast episode on that very topic!
Now let’s turn to the benefits of direct mail marketing, to better understand how they outweigh any costs involved.
The digital revolution has made it extremely easy for marketers to reach customers online at a very low cost. While this has definitely been a boon for the marketing world, it has also created a very cluttered, noisy digital advertising landscape. Marketers must exercise much more caution when deciding where to put marketing dollars. Spending huge amounts on paid advertising or email campaigns is super risky these days and no longer guarantees success.
As businesses adapt to shifting consumer habits, it's critical that your marketing strategy includes a number of different approaches to reaching customers. A successful marketing strategy uses multiple channels to achieve goals and boost ROI. Digital marketing is essential, as it offers immediate, wide exposure at costs that are hard to beat. But direct mail marketing still offers some of the best results in increasing brand awareness, retaining customers, and increasing ROI. Here are some of the main benefits of integrating direct mail into your cross-media marketing strategy.
A combination of digital marketing and direct mail increases your exposure and ability to reach more customers and leads. You can also leverage analytics to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of both digital and direct tactics because you will have more metrics to work with.
Some customers are more likely to engage with the two-way communication that digital marketing provides, while others prefer one-way communication with direct mail. They find it more comfortable to receive information in their mailbox, leaving it up to them to decide whether to take the desired action or not. Either way, personalized direct mail pieces motivate engagement on a personal level.
Creating brand loyalty is all about building and nurturing strong relationships. Living in a digital world means people around the globe are suffering from overloaded inboxes and information fatigue. Direct mail marketing can help build relationships with customers in a way that only well-known brands can do online.
A physical object, such as mail, has more perceived value than a virtual object. No one gets excited about receiving an email these days. But people like the personal attention that direct mail marketing provides. It can stir up the same level of excitement of getting a letter or postcard from a friend or family member. Customers love getting mail from brands they respect.
Using smart data, you can optimize your direct mail campaigns to reach targeted customers whose attention you may not have been able to get online. You can customize direct mail campaigns based on demographics, interests, recent transactions, browsing behavior, and more. From there, you can create tailored content that appeals to specific populations. This can help boost direct mail ROI and save your company a lot of money in the long run.
Direct mail marketing is a critical aspect of a solid omnichannel marketing strategy. By combining direct mail marketing with digital, you can take advantage of the opportunities that both channels afford. Following an email campaign with a direct mail campaign increases brand recall and response rates.
Don’t silo your marketing efforts into one channel. Combine different types of marketing and mailing avenues, such as digital banners, PPC, emails, inbound marketing, SMS, and other digital channels with direct mail to offer your customers a welcome break from digital overload. To see how Lob’s direct mail automation platform can improve your omnichannel marketing strategy, schedule a demo today.
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