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Direct mail comes with plenty of complexities, and without an effective strategy, and streamlined workflow, the process can become immensely time and resource-intensive.
Does it take months to execute a direct mail campaign? When sending out postcards, letters, checks, or other direct mail formats, do you struggle with long lead times? If so, there's a better way.
You can modernize your direct mail process for a true omnichannel customer experience. When you combine direct mail with your digital marketing channels, you can reduce churn, increase ROI, acquire new customers, and increase customer lifetime value.
How do you achieve all of the above and more?
Many companies that send a high volume of direct mail use a complex workflow that requires a great deal of manual process. This approach leads to inefficiencies that are cost and labor-intensive and reduce your team's ability to react in real-time.
What if you could program and control your direct mail campaigns just like you would email?
Cutting out manual processes to transition to direct mail automation can be a game-changer as it saves time, increases ROI, and enables you to automate and trigger direct mail based on customer behavior.
Your direct mail campaigns can seamlessly complement digital activities, especially when leveraging modern tools and cloud software. Best of all, when you transition to automation, you can use direct mail in new ways. For example, you can add more precise timing and enhance content personalization.
Recommended reading: 22 Direct Mail Trends for 2022
The traditional approach to the print and mail process is incredibly complex. Sure, many of the workflows can occur simultaneously. However, the cumulative time can quickly extend across months when factoring in creative work, proofing, approvals and revisions, list acquisition and formatting, postage, production, mailing, and reporting.
Timeline issues occur because of inefficiencies resulting from siloed work processes. For example, siloing restricts access to the direct mail channel, preventing broader organization teams from leveraging the channel. However, as technology advances and changes are made, this channel becomes more relevant to other teams.
With Lob, all of the steps can be automated or simplified through a programmatic service that integrates directly with your existing marketing tech stack.
Related: How To Use Marketing Automation Triggers To Send Direct Mail
When your goal is to be more operationally efficient through the power of effective print and mail automation, you must take a new approach. Now is the time to do so.
There are many manual complexities when running a direct mail campaign that lacks automation. For example, it's challenging to get visibility when managing multiple vendors across several platforms. Less visibility can lead to a lack of awareness, creating a domino effect that negatively affects offline communications and data.
The goal is to implement a trigger-based direct mail process connected to your CRM and marketing automation platform — which is made possible by Lob's Print & Mail and Address Verification APIs. When you automate direct mail and address verification at scale, you will benefit from greater visibility, flexibility, and accuracy.
Just some of the ways this can enhance business operations include the ability to:
For example, if you are a financial services company, you may send out 15,679 pieces of mail on 05/28. As time goes on, you can track this mail, seeing the percentage that was physically mailed, in transit, processed for delivery, and then the percentage that was re-routed and returned. Whether you send 100 pieces of mail or 100 million, the same capabilities remain.
With the help of direct mail automation, you can pivot away from a manual direct mail process. This approach will streamline repetitive processes to reduce labor- and time-intensive tasks.
Because Lob handles all of the steps for you, you no longer need to manage multiple parties or miss out on beneficial insight. Lob gives you full visibility into where direct mail is in the production process. When creating campaigns, you can also target specific in-mailbox dates, working back from that date to create your timeline.
Get the 2022 State of Direct Mail Report and see how modern marketers are leveraging direct mail to drive more ROI.
Schedule a demo to see just how to track direct mail using Lob's Print & Mail and Address Verification APIs.
